It seems the notion that silence is golden has lost its luster. As an industry, a collective collaborating to solve thorny measurement issues, we have not been tooting our horns recently. There has been much progress on the development of standards and testing needed to institutionalize a viewable impressions currency and then some.

Madison Avenue today is a study in contrast. The media ecosystem has become so complicated that, just to get a general idea of what is happening in digital, social, set-top and mobile requires supercomputers parsing Big Data terabytes. Yet for many Mad Ave residents, advertising is still a simple two-way street.

One of the most complex challenges facing marketers is trying to measure and understand the impact offline or online marketing has on purchases, regardless of where they take place. A classic example of this challenge is the difficulty in understanding the value of direct mail: Does it influence a customer to go online and make a purchase there, or ultimately in a store? How can one track it accurately? To truly understand the impact of the entire marketing mix, businesses need to understand what advertisements those buyers were exposed to before making a purchase.