When an organization engages in marketing attribution it knowingly or unknowingly makes the decision to build an enterprise marketing data warehouse within the database platform of its attribution provider of choice. Often this is the first time that such a repository is being created for the company's benefit, and the first time that most of the enterprise-level decisions/rules surrounding that data are being established. Though on the surface this may seem like a painful process, the most experienced attribution modeling providers have this process down to a streamlined, template-driven process that delivers great benefits to their clients beyond their attribution …

In the week leading up to the Facebook IPO, news broke that General Motors was pulling $10 million in display advertising from the world's largest social network due to poor performance. But after digging into the story a little deeper, one thing became clear: There seemed to be an issue with how GM was measuring its display advertising campaign performance.

Making Measurement Make Sense (3MS) has provided principles and solutions to pressing issues of digital measurement standardization. The one that seems to get the most attention is the proposed move from served to viewable ad impressions. The other one that people talk about is GRPs. But the more traction 3MS gets, the more we hear and read a variety of imprecise, even inaccurate stories about what 3MS or the current stage of testing is about.

A key finding of the recently published joint Forrester Consulting/IAB report, "Digital Attribution Comes of Age," was that "algorithmic attribution models are gaining acceptance, but some marketers remain skeptical." Specifically, the report states that algorithmic attribution's supporters say that it is "statistically principled, objective and unbiased," and that "data is setting the weights, not opinions." Meanwhile, detractors of the model say it is "difficult to explain," "opaque," and "subject to 'dangerous math' that can create misleading outcomes. Fortunately the algorithmic approach can be tested both in terms of the outcome and the causality assumptions.

The most recent ARF Audience Measurement conference was titled "The Measurement Crisis." Crisis or not, there were real signs of discord in the industry -- primarily about digital ratings.