• by Tig Tillinghast , September 6, 2002

Forbes.com on Wednesday told the world that it won’t charge advertisers for placements that prove completely ineffective. This is certainly not the first pay-for-performance guarantee in the industry, but it is a new type of guarantee. Instead of having to drive very specific metrics to get paid –a certain sales rate, for instance – Forbes.com merely has to have the advertising register on the scales of a brand and awareness study performed by Dynamic Logic.

This is less pay-for-performance than it is a guarantee of the merchantability of the media. It’s sort of a lemon law for media: if it’s completely broken, the dealer will take it back.

To the uninitiated this will sound very generous, but to the media buyers it seems a little overdue. After all, these reps have been representing to us that the media will do wonders for our brands and sales. Forbes.com now backs up these statements with policy.

Already the online media are far more advanced in their accountability to advertisers. Forbes.com deserves credit for becoming the thin end of the wedge for guaranteeing media merchantability, a concept that might well spread to traditional media.

And this is the interesting part. In a world in which media are compared against one another, we can expect some interesting budget shifts as a result. The mechanics work like this: Forbes.com shows that it has a certain level of effectiveness. Forbes magazine shows that it has a certain (presumably lower) level of effectiveness. Financial marketer scratches large Neanderthal brow and slowly figures out that he spends too much money on print relative to online.

There are a few strings attached to the Forbes.com project. $100,000 needs to be spent over two months to get good data for the study. That’s both reasonable in terms of data necessities and unreasonable in terms of that level of spending on one site breaking most online budgets. The program will consider the advertising to have worked if any one of the four major metrics measured register any positive movement.

A free suggestion to the Forbes.com people: have the guarantee kick in if the other three metrics go negative, even if one metric goes positive. Having negative branding effects is not just an indicator of poor creative (although this is quite likely), it’s also an indicator of improper audience. I wouldn’t, for instance, initiate a PETA-sponsored anti-capitalism campaign on Forbes.com and expect all the numbers to be positive.

Forbes.com deserves the status of innovator for codifying this policy. I hope it spreads, both online and off.