Obsessive Measurement Disorder - 06/06

This is not going to be one of those articles where a middle-aged publisher rants about the good old days, and excoriates the rise of email and the internet. The changes wrought by the digital revolution have been good — and bad — and all points in between. But the ship has sailed, and any balanced personality had better make peace with reality. Our own business model has expanded to include a well-trafficked website, and an e-newsletter to complement a healthy print magazine that provides a brand anchor for the whole package. I am content in a world where diverse media coexist. And if I need a long run in the park and a short glass of Jack Daniels each evening to speed acceptance of things I cannot change, so be it.

Still, I cannot resist noting that a lot of what passes for internet advice and strategy today is often a shallow obsession with online metrics. And it frequently comes at the expense of hard-won sales, marketing and media fundamentals. I hear the mantra so often from marketers and media buyers, it feels cult-like. “It’s all about the ROI.” “It’s all about thinking out of the box.” “Its all about search engine optimization.” “It’s all about the hits.” “It’s all about realtime feedback.” “It’s all about measurement.”

No. It’s really not.

It’s about serving the client’s communication needs. It’s about branding, identity, messaging, multiple touch points, human connections. It’s about earning customer loyalty and generating return customers, instead of hoping they will find you. It’s about building value for a company or organization by using the full range of tools and media and knowledge that are available. It’s sitting and thinking, not jumping on the bandwagon. Of course, ROI and measurement and feedback and click-thrus and immediacy can be an important part of the program. Very important. I monitor our performance closely every day. Sometimes two or three times a day.

But here are a few of sobering thoughts:

One comes from the Chief Marketer newsletter. Ray Schultz writes, “Most marketing execs pay lip service to the notion of accountability. But a staggering 84% say that their firm’s ability to measure Web marketing is limited at best.” He quotes a web expert as follows: “The challenge is due to a lack of consistent, goal-based metrics to measure reach, frequency and conversion across all online campaigns.”

A second is from a column by Leslie Walker of The Washington Post: “Click fraud... has mushroomed into a problem so thorny that some analysts fear it could bring the high-flying internet economy to its knees.” Walker cites examples of bogus traffic rising as high as 35%.

A third is noted by Amy Larsen DeCarlo of the insightful InternetWeek enewsletter: “Unfortunately, it seems that cybercriminals have caught onto the profit potential in harnessing search engines for their own misdeeds.” DeCarlo gives the example of Splogs, “the fake web blog sites that are populated with link-filled stolen or nonsensical text meant to drive traffic to disreputable sites and raise their search engine rankings...”

And here is a fourth point, more fundamental and less fixable. John Craven, president of the BevNet internet portal, is quoted in Folio: as observing, “From a reader standpoint, there’s something more legitimate about print than with a website. You can hold it in your hands.”

This last idea, which bubbles to the surface in our annual print survey, suggests that internet communications may be too easy and, at the same time, too fragile to communicate credibility, accountability, permanence, legitimacy. In a multi-channel world, tangible print may better channel trust. That is the most vexing thought of all for those afflicted with obsessive measurement disorder.