• by Maarten Albarda , Featured Contributor, February 16, 2015

Don’t say I don’t love you, dear reader, because today I have decided to talk about Fractional Attribution. I just knowthat you care about this deeply.

For financial companies, airlines, hotels and other direct sellers, the art and science of what might drive consumers to buy their product has become quite a bit clearer over the last decade -- that is, unless these companies also sell through brick and mortar. For everybody else -- despite the fact that we generate more data in a day then people in the olden days would gather in a lifetime -- we are still very much in the dark about how all that we do in marketing works toward the ultimate goal: selling a product.

Fractional Attribution is the new science of figuring out which part of the media mix drove what kind of effect on the sale of any advertised product.

Wait… new science? Since the beginning of time in marketing, we have tried to understand if any of the marketing mix elements actually contributed anything meaningful to the end result. It was David Ogilvy who famously said, "When I write an advertisement, I don’t want you to tell me that you find it ‘creative.’ I want you to find it so interesting that you buy the product." I'm sure you know the oft-quoted John Wanamaker statement about wasting 50% of his budget but not knowing which 50%.

Wanamaker lived from 1838 to 1922. In the last century, people like Colin McDonald, John Philip Jones, Walter Reichel and Erwin Ephron worked tirelessly to try to understand what worked in marketing. And then there was the body of work from the late, great Simon Broadbent. I was fortunate enough to work with this pioneering mind in the mid- to late 80s at Leo Burnett in London. Broadbent wrote books like “Accountable Advertising: A Handbook For Managers And Analysts” and “Spending Advertising Money” (with Brian Jacobs, my then-boss). He was known as the father of the British IPA Awards, which demand that “entrants provide bullet-proof evidence of the effectiveness of their communications” (per their website).

And now the industry is all of a sudden enthralled with discussing Fractional Attribution, as if giving “marketing effectiveness” a new badge magically creates a new science and better insights.

Don’t get me wrong: The question is as relevant today as it was in the days of John Wanamaker’s predicament. It’s just that his 50% may have now actually grown to almost 100% (again, unless you sell directly only through the Internet). Marketers grapple with understanding those darn unpredictable, multimedia-using, self-publishing, all-over-the-place consumers and their path to purchase across all channels and touch points. If they would only sit still in front of the TV and not watch or do anything else…

The fact that Fractional Attribution is getting as much attention as it has might actually be a good thing. At least we are still talking about wanting to understand what works, still trying to solve the muddled path-to-purchase puzzle. The frustration is that we haven’t made as much progress as the fancy new name, the availability of more data, and better technology would suggest.