Natural Born Clickers - Your audience does not click on ads!

Coming from the iMedia Brand Summit, a few GREAT quotes that are very much in line with the theme of my blog:

If Not The Click, Then What?
“A click means nothing. A click earns no revenue and creates no brand equity. Your online advertising has some goal –and it’s surely not to generate clicks. You want people to visit your website, seek more information, purchase a product, become a lead, keep your brand top of mind, learn something new, feel differently, etc. Regardless of whether they clicked an ad or not, the key is to determine how that ad unit influenced a consumer to think, feel, or do something they wouldn’t have done otherwise.

”John Lowell, SVP Director, Research & Analytics, Starcom

"By measuring the last ad seen or clicked by a converter, they focus entirely on a brief time span at the bottom of the funnel. Evaluating only a single point of advertising contact oversimplifies the delivery and performance of any media channel"

Microsoft’s Atlas Institute

Ad-exposed non-clickers account for the vast majority of Internet users = 85% of all online users.

Who Clicks, Why, and Does It Matter

Great post by Gavin O'Malley in MediaPost today....http://www.mediapost.com/publications/?fa=Articles.showArticle&art_aid=149267

This is even more proof that clicks are not the intended measure of web advertising, and will likely go the way of the 468x60 banner. (Yes, I Occasionally see a random 468x60 out in the wild, and makes me chuckle a bit - I further digress to around 2002 @ SF Big party where Scott McLernon came to the front of the room with a casket for the dead ad unit size - "The Official Death of the 468x60" was declared!

Campaign measurement and performance is critical to understand the investment in ad spend. Many advertisers have become much more sophisticated and savvy with regards to understanding the impact their online advertising has for driving brand health metrics, or ROAS.

We're heading in an interesting direction here at BuzzLogic, and working to help brand advertisers to understand organic brand lift metrics within the conversational media space. Specifically, we're finding that when advertisers place media within dense conversations which are relevant, influential, and authoritative to the marketing communication strategy... we're seeing significant organic, positive lift. To me, this tells an insightful story for the brand which a click simply can't.

I'm glad to see that our organization and the industry in general is looking towards new solutions and advanced analytics that will hopefully power our industry to get off the "click-through-rate" reporting methodology.

The first step of change is simply to identify there is a problem... Love the MediaPost post this morning as it's further validation that the industry does indeed have a problem.