Peter Field and Les Binet’s The Long and Short of It has helped focus attention on the pitfalls of short-termism and the missed opportunity around balancing longer and shorter-term goals.

Our purpose at The Readership Works is to provide the best readership metric to inform smarter media-buying decisions.  This can only be achieved through a real understanding of the broader data environment and how media measurement can fit into it.

We talk to marketers, media owners, creative agencies, media agencies and researchers to enrich our outlook on what matters.  Right now, we are at an interesting crossroads with growing recognition that merely being able to measure something does not mean one should, or that it is relevant to the real goal of creating both brand equity and sales. 

What we’re focusing on

• Surrogation: There is a human tendency to confuse the ways in which we measure things with the things we are actually trying to measure. Obsession over clicks and likes, views and impressions can take over our attention to the point that we no longer place our objectives at the centre of our strategy.
• Short-termism: The prevailing business environment, supercharged by digital has us hooked on instant gratification, and it is nice to have instant feedback on the performance of marketing campaigns, too. However, this masks the reality that campaigns may not change customer behaviour in the short term, but rather, increase brand consideration over the long term.
• Creativity: This seems to have suffered as a result of our data-driven approaches and mindless focus on big data/quantitative data. Numbers are easy to rely on, they’re comfortable and certain. But this is not where creativity thrives. Some wisdom from Jeff Bezos: “Most decisions should probably be made with somewhere around 70% of the information you wish you had. If you wait for 90%, in most cases, you’re probably being slow.”
• Thick Data: Quantitative data needs to be put in context through qualitative information. Putting the two together is where deeper insights can be found giving detail around the way people make decisions, the way they live their lives, the cultural context they’re living in.
• ‘Hammerism’: No, not the MC kind, but the phenomenon recognized in the parable, ‘Give a man a hammer and he thinks everything is a nail’ (and yes, I just made that term up). In this instance, we refer to the vast investment in martech and adtech as the hammer and every possible available piece of data as the nails when sometimes you need a sextant.

Takeout

Ultimately, we are concerned with where attention should be focused and how to best integrate into that environment.  This means we continue to evolve how we surface our data, placing even greater emphasis on making our metric available to as many platforms as possible rather than trying to own or force fit a solution.

We will still be a supplier of data for the transaction between buyer and seller, but we will also be one of the metrics that matter for measuring business activities and outcomes.