There is always a lot of debate in interactive advertising about metrics. Do clicks matter? What is engagement? What’s an impression really worth? But the biggest debate by far is whether to use traditional advertising metrics such as reach, frequency, and GRP. Even here at ThinkMulticultural, we’ve been “preaching for a while that the old, closed brand management model based on awareness, reach and frequency is dead.”

Although I’m no huge fan of the supposed effectiveness of using traditional advertising metrics, I think that interactive advertising professionals and media companies do ourselves a great disservice to ignore them.

About a month ago, Geoff Ramsey, the CEO of eMarketer, did a post titled “The Great GRP Debate” discussing whether online advertising should adopt traditional offline ad metrics. He makes some good points that reach and frequency metrics contain important information marketers need to measure the effectiveness of their advertising. However, his key point boils down to this – marketers understand traditional metrics and are used to buying media that is measured by them.

In business school they taught us that people go to the hardware store not because they want a drill, but because they want holes. The drill is just the tool they will use to make the holes. Similarly, marketers buy air time not because they want commercials, but because they want their message to reach customers. They cannot measure for sure that their message is reaching customers, so for decades the they have bought GRPs as a placeholder for received messages.

Online advertising is growing quickly and is expected to be over 10% of ad spending in 2010. If my math is right, that means around 90% of ad spending will not be online and will not use online metrics. If marketers spend 90% of their money buying GRPs, why not make it easier for them to spend that last 10%?

You have to speak the language of your customer. The greatest English-speaking salesman in the world probably could sell in Russia, but he’d do a lot better if he spoke Russian. Smiles, gestures and analogies only get you so far. Marketers are used to buying GRPs. If you’re selling impressions, clicks, or engagement, you’re not speaking their language and therefore aren’t speaking their language. Don’t make it any harder for yourself.

In the eMarketer post, Young-Bean Song, Atlas Institute (Microsoft) puts it this way: “You will never see P&G and Unilever and those guys spend online unless we give them reach, frequency and GRPs. Their entire business model is based on that.”

Ramsey boiled the arguments against these traditional metrics down to two basic points: 1) traditional reach and frequency metrics fail to take into account the Internet’s unique interactive qualities, and 2) reach and frequency are inadequate metrics to capture the rich engagement and viral pass-along benefits of social media and video programs.

My response is “So what?” Yes, online media has important interactive features that are not captured by traditional metrics, and yes traditional metrics fail to capture engagement and so many other things that social media provide, but neither of those is reason enough to refuse to speak the language media buyers understand and will pay for.

As Ramsey put it “If you, as an advertiser, can figure out how to do the appropriate math… you can apply GRPs to digital in a way that allows for apples-to-apples comparisons with other media… You can start integrating online into the sophisticated media mix models you’ve been using for years.”

Interactive media does have reach and frequency, and you can calculate GRPs for it. You can also measure many, many other things about it. If you position it right, you can sell media buyers not only the GRPs they’re looking for, but you can sell them a better GRP that comes with interactive metrics such as engagement, conversions, clicks, impressions, buzz, and virality.

Media buyers are used to buying apples. Don’t sell them oranges. Sell them apples with a turbocharged engine and flame decals.

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Tags: metrics