• by Bill Wise , September 1, 2011

If I had to grossly oversimplify the experience/metrics arguments in advertising, I'd sum it up this way: if you're concerned with experience, for you the most important thing is sharing a great story in an engaging way. If you're concerned with data, you're only interested in sharing stories that you can tie to sales.

It's a familiar tale. But two news stories from last week underscore how metrics are changing -- and why the new metrics are building great experiences, not undermining them.

The first story is a Los Angeles Timespiece on Arbitron, a leading radio rating service. Arbitron, and other rating services like it, measure how  people consume media throughout their week -- information that they sell to marketers and media planning and buying companies, who use it to help determine where and when to place their  media buys. In radio, acquiring that information has traditionally meant arming scores of "average people" with notebooks, known as "diaries," in which they're asked to write down their daily listening experience. A few years back, Arbitron switched the diaries to Portable People Meters (PPMs): small devices  carried around that electronically record  individual radio listening habits.

The LA Times piece explored what happened next. Some of the results were unsurprising, like the fact that electronic measurement showed how diary-keepers over-reported listening to some stations, and underreported listening to others. But what is notable is how much of the radio-producing experience was created to ensure that diary-keepers don't forget to write that they're actually listening to a given station, such as radio announcers' habit of incessantly repeating call numbers or station promotions. Now that the machines are doing the recording, the stations are dialing back on that self-promotion -- and listeners are hearing more content and programming as a result.

Now let's turn to the digital space -- particularly, to online media startup Moat (Disclosure: Moat was founded by  former colleagues  of mine from Yahoo! Right Media.) Moat recently introduced  "mouse hovering" measurement for display ads. The premise is simple: Even though display advertising is an engagement medium, it's extremely hard to measure display ad engagement. And so advertisers began to measure direct interactions - click-throughs -- instead. But since display ads typically underperform on click-through rates, display ad impact often goes underreported. Mouse hovering measurement attempts to solve this problem. It records how users engage with a display ad via their mouse, and allows media planners  to understand the engagement that display ads actually drive. Powerful stuff.

As measurement like mouse hovering takes off, you can be sure that two things will happen. First, display will finally be recognized for the value it produces. Second, as we stop measuring display as solely a direct response medium, and more as the engagement medium it actually is, we'll spend a lot more energy creating display ads that truly engage.

If I'm right about that second point -- and I think I am -- then the story about Moat and the story about Arbitron hold an incredible lesson about the connection between gathering metrics and crafting experience.

Creating powerful experiences is a subtle, elegant, complex, and nuanced art. It's the art of fitting the things businesses sell into the hopes and dreams that make up real life. But for most of the history of media measurement, the metrics were a lot less nuanced than real life, leaving marketers often facing either/or decisions about focusing on creating great experiences or creating measurable ones.  CMOs and agencies were left choosing between investing in search (measurable) or investing in rich media (experiential). Radio stations were forced to shape the listener's experience around measurement needs.

What's changed isn't just that metrics are better at measuring subtlety -- which they are. What's changed is that measurement has moved from a separate activity to one that's woven into real life. The separate activity of diary-recording has been replaced by set-it-and-forget-it devices. Measuring conscientious clicking has been replaced by measuring a much more instinctive activity: the way people explore a new experiences with their hands.

That's a far more organic measurement than we've ever seen before. And when you're able to weave the measurement into everyday life in that way, you can create metrics that show a picture of what a person's real life looks like -- and create great experiences from them.

The end result is that art imitates metrics, which imitate life. Great news for the data folks, and the experience folks.