Measuring our Failure

Over at MediaPost, Jeff Einstein has a good column (link below) on how recent improvements in our ability to measure "return on investment" of media dollars has NOT led to lots better advertising, but to lots more advertising and measuring and frantic flailing attempts to shout louder. (Remind you of Tom Davenport's Attenion Economy?) Although Einstein is pretty bummed out about it, I do see some hope. We've just gotten a new set of tools, and we're not all using them correctly yet, but some of us are trying. Let's take his message as a rallying cry for all of us who want to make a positive difference.

Link: MediaPost Einstein's Corner: ROI - Return On Intimacy (registration required)

Once upon a time we could live with the uncertainty represented by the notion that advertising worked 50 percent of the time. Now, however, we find the fact that we know with absolute certainty that advertising doesn't work 99.8 percent of the time absolutely unbearable. Our response is classic addiction 101: Faster, smarter, better. Eat all you want, we'll make more. The result: millions of consumers and thousands of corporations spend billions of dollars just for the opportunity to [make] their escape and turn us off.

Millions of consumers and thousands of corporations have been hit over and over again from every conceivable angle -- and none have been touched in the process.

Enough is enough. If we're going to make the collective effort to reach out and touch someone thousands of times each and every day, we simply better have something more worthwhile to say, some message worth touching them with.