With apologies to Marshall McLuhan, when it comes to advertising commerce, the medium isn't just the message. It's also the metrics. Or, perhaps it's the other way around: The metrics are the medium.
It's a lesson I learned early in my career, as a young reporter covering media for Adweek nearly 30 years ago. It didn't take me long to realize that what people on Madison Avenue were actually
buying during their "upfront" network TV negotiations wasn't TV shows -- or even commercial units placed within those TV programs. What they were buying -- and what they continue to buy to this day.
-- are "GRPs," or gross rating points. Once you come to grips with that, you understand how important the role of audience measurement and analytics truly are for the world of media commerce.
It's certainly true for television. And it's especially true for online and other forms of digital media. And as we sit in New York today at the OMMA Metrics & Measurement conference, I cannot help
but wonder what the new advances in online measurement portend for the rest of the media world.
We sit here just a couple of days before the U.S. boradcast TV industry goes digital, and with
it, a whole new era of advanced analytics will be unleashed on the media world, giving TV the kind of addressability that online online has had to date.
Agencies have already figured that
out, and are rebuilding their organizations to more effectively plan, buy -- indeed, "trade" -- all media in a way that is more akin to Wall Street than Madison Avenue. Just look at Interpublic's new
Cadreon. It's no coincidence that interpublic designed the new trading system to handle TV, as well as online, mobile, or any medium with a return path of targetable consumer profile data -- which
pretty much means any medium, since all media is going digital.
The implications are profound. Along with that shift is a corresponding shift. Madison Avenue no longer is buying media, says
Interpublic digital media chief Quentin George. It is now buying "audiences."
That was probably true back in the days when I discovered that TV shops were actually buying GRPs, not programs.
But until now, they at least had the conceit that the programming mattered, and that context was just as important as the rating points. That may no longer be true as agencies shift to a higher order
of analytics, and "attributution," that seeks to understand the consumer's journey with a brand -- a journey in which media content may simply be some plot points on a flow chart that got the consumer
in front of the brand. In other words, content is becoming just an intermediary. In other words, content is just becoming a medium -- a means to that end.
It probably always was, but the
advances in metrics and analytics are finally exposing that conceit.
Don't get me wrong, as the editor-in-chief of MediaPost, I am effectively the chief content officer of a company that
publishes content to attract readers like you. But I know that it is the ability of our tech and sales teams to convert readers like you into solid metrics that is where our value is really created in
the marketplace. I know this, because it is what I write about. And it is what you are reading about.