The advertising industry continues to price media placement based on impressions – and it's destroying your business. Agencies use impressions or CPMs to show clients how successful their marketing and media plans are, but basing your marketing success on impressions is about as useful as plugging in a dial-up modem to connect to your AOL account.
Impressions only tell you the theoretical number of times that people might have seen your ad. But there are two massive problems with this.
First, just because your ad was in the same place as a human doesn't mean it was ever seen. Go jump on a subway car in New York City during rush hour. It's packed end-to-end; dozens of people are crammed into a small space with nowhere to go. Multiply that by hundreds of subway cars across the city and you get a million people stuck in a tin can at the same time with nothing else to look at but the beautiful ads hanging above their heads.
Except there's one problem: Every single person is glued to their iPhone. They aren't looking at your ads, but you still "got" a million impressions. A million impressions without anyone even seeing your ad.
Second, those impressions are not calculated based on some digital technology that knows exactly how many people looked at your subway ad. It's based on how many people are likely to be in that subway car at that given time – that's how many impressions you get. Then the agency charges you for them and you pay for all of those impressions, even if every person on that subway did nothing but play Candy Crush for the entire ride.
Television has the same problem. It's shocking to me how many marketers don't truly realize that the impressions or gross ratings points they are buying aren't calculated by technology. TV ratings are calculated by monitoring 25,000 households and then the using statistics to guess the rest. This is the same way that political polls are calculated (and we all know how misleading those can be). Even if they are 100% accurate, you're still paying for all the people who aren't actually watching the ads.
Now answer this question honestly: When you watch TV and commercials come on, do you sit there and watch them, or do you pick up your phone and check your email, Facebook, Instagram or Snapchat? You might not even pick up your phone – maybe you just use your DVR and skip the ads. So as a consumer, you don't pay attention to the ads, but as a marketer, you'll pay millions of dollars for those theoretical impressions?
The industry is changing right before our eyes. Marketing that worked 10 years ago doesn't work today. That's a fact. But this isn't a bad thing -- it's a massive opportunity for the brands, marketers and agencies that understand how to navigate the media landscape of today.
At my agency, BOLD Worldwide, we are focusing on the tactics that actually have an impact for businesses. We don't care about impressions or the CPM because it doesn't matter. We care about results. Is the marketing we're doing for our clients increasing their sales? Is it growing their bottom line? Are we telling a powerful story that resonates for decades to come? Results-based marketing is all that matters today.
You must know what you're trying to achieve from your marketing and then track that result. It is completely possible to know not only how many people saw your ads (impressions) but how many people actually watched your video all the way to the end. We know if they like your ad. We know if they buy your product because of your ad.
For example, if you run a paid Facebook ad campaign for a video about your company, you can see how many people the video reached via their news feed, look at the comments and reactions to the video in real time, and then run a report to see how many people watched the video to completion (people showing very high interest in your company). What’s even more powerful is you can now target other ads and content toward only the people who watched the entire video. They are pre-qualified, showed interest and have a high sense of awareness of your company.
Unlike traditional media, this gives you the ability to change your marketing approach, messaging, content and offers based on the context of how people are interacting with your advertising. Basically, we know if we're driving real business results.
To me, this seems obvious. But I am constantly shocked at how many marketers and agencies are still sending reports highlighting the total impressions from last week to their clients.
If you work for a brand, ask to see the results of your marketing. Did your sales go up? Did you get more leads? Were more people talking about you? What was the sentiment of your latest campaign in the first few hours? How many people watched your video to the end because they liked it?
Results should be both short- and long-term. You can drive sales while also building a brand; it's not one or the other. It really needs to be both. However, you can't build a brand by just buying impressions. You need to know that it worked, that it was seen, that people took an action, and that your results are tied to your marketing.
Ignore impressions. Ignore CPMs. Have them removed from your monthly report. Save yourself the brain power and replace them with useful metrics. And the next time you see that spreadsheet line containing impressions or CPMs, remember the sound of your old dial-up modem connecting to the internet. Times have changed.
