Making an urgent case for media accountability

Sweden leads the pack in being the first ever developed economy to see internet spend surpass TV. Debbie Cai reports.

Emphasis on media measurement is fine as long as we don't just do things we can measure, Dominic Proctor,  CEO of MindShare Worldwide told Marketing magazine when he was in town recently to speak at the World Effie Festival 2008.

"The big trap if we go down this path, then people will prefer to fail accurately than to succeed roughly. So the emphasis is placed on the accuracy rather than the outcome of the project."

Proctor explains the reason for a preoccupation with measurement is the fact that marketers are under so much pressure to deliver financial targets and it's all part of the more transparent world we live in where marketing dollars are under much more scrutiny than before.

What can be measured should be measured accurately and some things which are not measurable, which are more creative perhaps, will remain up to judgment, he says, adding that marketers today are in their jobs for a much shorter period of time (the average worldwide is 14 months) and they sometimes are mis-cast as project managers rather than enduring custodians of the brand.

The biggest challenge he faces, Proctor says, is moving from an analog to a digital model whilst being good at both.

"With digital, in some senses it's more chaotic because there are so many options but in some senses it's less chaotic because if we get it right, then our data will be more accurate in tracking specific actions from specific people."

With mobile advertising, he says consumers are happy to accept an invasion to their mobile phone in exchange for something but "we haven't found a way to crack the creative" nor have we found a model which is "particularly effective".

Marketers, on the other hand, are figuring out the best ways to measure their marketing spend. According to Proctor, most big companies have plenty of data but it is arguable that not all are using the data in the right way and should be spending more time fusing their different data sources together to get a better understanding of the link between expenditure and media and brand choice and brand power.

To date, roughly 20% of MindShare's revenue comes from additional services such as data analytics, digital, content, and forecasts see it increasing to 30% and beyond.

Within the digital arena, he agrees marketers tend to nit-pick more with digital media accountability than that of traditional media "because you can... because you can measure digital media most accurately, you tend to focus on it."

However, in a worldwide breakthrough, Sweden will this year become the first developed economy where advertising on the internet will be greater than advertising on TV.  According to GroupM's ‘This year, next year' report forecasting worldwide and media trends, the percentage share of media in Sweden for internet is forecasted to be 19.5% in 2008, surpassing TV's 19.2%.

"It's the first one but then all the other dominants will fall," Proctor says, "And the UK's not far behind. The biggest media owners in Sweden or the UK are internet platforms now and not traditional broadcasters."