Its ironic. The most measurable medium is least understood by its own stakeholders.
Its ironic. The most measurable medium is least understood by its own stakeholders.
Given the digital media’s intrinsic ingenuity of services, and the way it is being adopted and is growing, it is becoming business critical to use it. As we go forward, it is bound to become government critical and society critical too.
However, we are nowhere near realising the full potential of internet for businesses yet.
If I want to run an integrated digital marketing campaign, I would typically choose search engine marketing (SEM), banner buy and social media marketing, with a strong analytics in the background. Since internet is a measurable medium, I should, from the word go, be able to track, monitor, tweak and optimise the campaign performance as per the desired objectives. After all, all the stake holders of the campaign, viz. the publishers, my client and me, the agency, should be happy and successful in the end.
But, while I am able to use the best of creative and technologies available, I find myself unable to take full advantage of the medium.
Take the banner part of the campaign. For going live, I would deal with more than five publishers. Each one will have a different rate card, different properties and different formats to release orders, not to mention a different negotiation technique for each engagement (scope engagement process or standards and rates are absent). Then, I would have to generate creative material with different sizes and different tags for us to track. The banners are needed in different variants to fit each publisher’s specifications (no production standards here either).
Each publisher has his own understanding of what data will be tracked, and this is not uniform. In fact, in a certain case, a publisher does not track frequency cap (what you get is what I can track)! When the campaign goes live, I do not have any clue of the campaign’s performance, live. The reports are 24 hours delayed and no support for the reports is provided. I have no opportunity to optimise the campaign real time, and whatever I do, I am deciding on obsolete data to increase return on investment (talk about real time tracking and optimisation for ROI).
When we compare our own tracked data with that of the publishers, there are discrepancies of 10% to 82%. I strongly believe a click is a click is a click, but have to behave differently.
The issues are almost the same in SEM, too, if we are using multiple SEs. The issues are a little different in the social media marketing, but they are there.
As an integrated digital marketer, I can say with a good certainty that the most measurable medium is the least understood by its own stake holders. This is really ironic.
That is because standards and norms for this medium are non-existent. Be it agency or publisher accreditation, audits rating, production standards, reporting/ release order formats, or credit recovery norms. Be it what you have. We need them all and we need them now, to help each one of us take complete advantage of the internet as a medium, today and tomorrow.
If we do not take steps today to make this medium business critical, we will stand to lose a lot when it becomes government critical and society critical in future, when the mobile gets interwoven with the internet.
The author is head of global delivery centre, Pinstorm Technologies. Views are personal. 
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