• Perverting Your Metrics
    A fake memo shows the way. Sample: "We can offer customers a $10 bonus coupon to allow our sales associates to "help" them complete the survey before they leave the store, thus providing both convenience and value to our customers."
  • Keeping It CIMM-ple
    By now many Mediapost's readers know about the formation of the Council for Innovative Media Measurement. CIMM, comprised of fourteen companies and including major advertisers, agencies, and TV companies, has a mission to "promote innovation and explore new, high quality ways to measure audiences across traditional and new media." In particular, this innovation and quality would be with respect to cross-platform, "three screen" measurement; and, to the development of meaningful ROI metrics that bring video audience measurement beyond traditional ratings, which measure the "opportunity to see" an ad, to encompassing meaningful data on the impact and value of advertising.
  • Confused? Three Must-Haves For Your Après-Recession Marketing Plan
    The double-whammy of irrational consumers on top of a waning recession poses a new challenge for marketers as we enter the 2010 budget planning process. Indeed, among companies we polled earlier this summer, marketers are split on how their budgets will change next year. But regardless of whether you plan to ramp up or throttle back your marketing budgets, we are all faced with the same edict: cost-effectively matching post-recession marketing to consumers' new attitudes and purchase behaviors.
  • Eat Pizza, Stay Thin -- But Sacrifice Credibility
    Anyone who has studied the question of increasing spend in a recession (and done so objectively) will tell you that the evidence supporting higher spending in recessions is weak at best. There are many anecdotes and some success stories, but not enough clear evidence to convince even a moderately smart CFO that the reward outweighs the risks. If you think I'm saying that spending more is NOT a good strategy, you're missing the point. Spending more MIGHT be the perfect strategy. Or it might be the last bad choice of your career. Success during recessionary (or slow recovery) times has …
  • Web Analytics: Easy? Hard? Complex? It Depends
    In the Web analytics industry, there has been an ongoing debate for some time over whether analytics is easy, hard, complex, or both hard and complex. Certain thought leaders advocate for each categorization. My take on it is "it depends" on the tools you are using, the site you are analyzing, your company's requirements, your team's skill set, and the processes you define for analytics.
  • Visualizing Data
    Looking at your data is just as important as reading your data. Not all of us can see the obvious by just looking at numbers, even if we don't consider ourselves "visual" people. I've learned this quite extensively in my current job when presenting data findings to a combination of both finance and product teams. Some people are "table" folks and others are "chart" folks. Regardless, the combination of the two data presentation methods jogs the brain and forces you to see the data in new ways and patterns. Here are three reasons why you need to visualize your data....
  • 'Any Idiot Can Optimize One Variable'
    That was how one former colleague expressed his frustration when a new employer framed all the company's goals in terms of new customer orders. A predictable consequence followed: managers dug out every kind of discount packaging ever hatched by the JV sales team in pursuit of scoring orders; and lo and behold, new customers came and ordered -- almost as quickly as profit margins fell. It's easy for most of us in online advertising to chuckle at a story of one-metric management, given that as a group we have more performance data than any other group outside of the Federal …
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