NAMS ARE OBSESSED WITH VANITY.

Impressions. New Age Marketers, or NAMS, are obsessed with them. 

Regrettably, some NAMS are not interested in achieving business outcomes and brand building. Rather, they’re focussed on a hollow vanity metric.   

Too many like the idea of using big numbers to insert into power point presentations. They hope to wow (and at times deceive) a group of executives, claiming their campaigns have delivered the goods – and enhanced brand awareness by scoring millions, and millions of impressions.

Anyone with an ounce of understanding into the myth and corruption of this digital metric would call bull-shit instantly.

Quite simply, an impression is defined as one person (device or browser) seeing one ad. The words ‘person’ and ‘seeing’ are key here.

Impressions are a measure of the number of instances where devices or people – potentially, perhaps for a fleeting moment – may have been exposed to your message.

What some self-proclaimed, ‘respected’ publishers conveniently don’t divulge is that they absurdly count an impression, despite the campaign message not even being seen. A placeholder loading, for example, is enough for them to add to the impression count!

But wait, there’s more. Let’s consider an ad that’s placed ‘below the fold’ where it can't be seen. Yep, that’s counted too.

So, how much value does one place on an impression number when your campaign message hasn’t even been seen? And how can one possibly measure a campaign’s performance by merely presenting a bogus impression number? These are questions to ask NAMS.

Enter sanity. Today viewability can be tracked through third-party technology. GroupM currently uses MOAT which allows the tracking of digital display, video, and social campaigns, and compares how viewable they are against industry and it’s tougher GroupM standards.

The Interactive Advertising Bureau (IAB) define a video ad as viewable if 50% of the ad has been in view for a minimum of two consecutive seconds. What the? What can one possibly derive from seeing only half the ad for a total of two seconds?

GroupM believes this definition is not strict enough, and apply their own definition: a video ad can be considered viewable if 100% of the ad has been in view for half the duration of video and was viewed by a human – not a BOT.

Let’s use a footy example. Robbie Gray gets 50 possessions. Great game right? But what if I gave you a fuller picture, a broader perspective on his performance? After further examination, 30 of Robbie’s possessions missed the desired target (clearly a fictional example as Robbie never misses) And another ten were in ‘junk time’. So how would you evaluate Robbie’s game?

Many platforms promise millions of impressions. But millions of impressions doesn’t guarantee high target audience reach.

Nielsen recently measured a campaign for a beauty care brand, designed to improve its image among younger women. The primary target audience was women 18-34 years, and they ran 213 million impressions across 14 websites for a six-week period. Nielsen’s analysis showed that 33% of the impressions reached the desired audience, while 40% of the impressions were served to men.

After further examination, the campaign reached only 10.5 million women. Sure, that’s still a big number, but obviously a far cry from 213 million.  

Take a look at campaign case studies which featured messaging across hundreds of websites, and the results are the same. The web constantly delivers millions of impressions to the wrong people. Pretending that’s not the case is the communications equivalent of being a climate-change denier.

In Seth Godin’s blog post ‘Moving Beyond Impressions’, he talked about what’s often presented in boardrooms globally – online advertisers bragging about their impression numbers. Instead of impressions, Godin recommends focussing on brand perception and interaction.

Godin is right. Simply using the impressions metric in the absence of further examination of the broader impact of a campaign is senseless, and poor practice. 

As trained marketers we should be digging deeper, beneath the surface and going beyond the misleading, vanity metric that impressions are.

The current era of marketing communications is bewildering. When did a core business and campaign objective become about striving to achieve a meaningless number, as opposed to prompting a response – and winning the hearts and minds of customers?

As for NAMS? Well, a cold shower is in order.