What’s Missing in the Media Measurement vs Currency Debate

One of the most hotly debated topics in the media industry today is about measurement and currency. The TV industry is absolutely consumed with the emergence of new currencies.

Currency is important, however, it’s simply a starting point to transact a campaign. Marketers care about the endpoint: the ROI for media on selling products and meeting campaign KPIs. Changing the currency won’t tackle this problem. As long as the industry continues to conflate the two, it will stay locked in a vortex that does not answer the real question: Is my media spend working?

As the TV industry becomes more involved with digital, it must learn from its digital counterparts about the benefits of looking at currency and measurement as two distinct things. Yet even digital’s currency framework won’t quite fit for TV.

While there should be some correlation between the two, it’s how marketers differentiate currency and measurement that is the real challenge. If marketers use impressions to transact and value success, then they have created a new but equally bad measuring stick.?

It’s clear that the industry needs to shift to a new paradigm that accounts for KPI attribution and holds every party accountable, but what would that new paradigm look like, and how would it work??

Pam Zucker shares her insights in this article for Adweek.