Microsoft appeared heavily in the press today because of their announcement regarding measuring “Engagement Mapping.” I think this is certainly welcome in the marketplace but they are hardly the first to pave this path. Back in June, Atlas released a study that critiques “last click” attribution.

Taken straight from the press release that Microsoft has up on their website:

“The ‘last ad clicked’ is an outdated and flawed approach because it essentially ignores all prior interactions the consumer has with a marketer’s message,” said Brian McAndrews, senior vice president of the Advertiser & Publisher Solutions (APS) Division at Microsoft. “Our Engagement Mapping approach conveys how each ad exposure — whether display, rich media or search, seen multiple times on multiple sites and across many channels — influenced an eventual purchase. We believe it represents a quantum leap for advertisers and publishers who are seeking to maximize their online spends.”

Think about how many ad impressions you may see of a particular brand/campaign. If you see one on television, one in the newspaper in the morning, one in your RSS reader when checking the news, and then another in search, and you click on the search link… should search get 100% of the attribution? No, however, how do you assign attribution back to television, print, rss, and search? This is what MSFT and a whole bunch of other smart people are trying to figure out.

TechCrunch rightly so points out that MSFT was vague on details about this announcement. We all talk about engagement and metrics surrounding how our media teams should buy/sell inventory; but it’s going to take more than just one study and one vendor. We all know that some of the metrics we use each day are flawed for certain types of buys (CTR for awareness campaigns?) - but it’s what we’ve been using for the last 10 years or so, but shouldn’t be the reason we continue to use them.

The digital world is dynamic and using metrics set in the 90s may not be valid for today. While we may be able to move quickly and adapt, can the rest of the market and the rest of the world? Some shops don’t even have digital capabilities yet….

I’m extremely interested in this.

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This entry was posted on Monday, February 25th, 2008 at 4:17 pm and is filed under Advertising & Marketing, Internet & Web X.0, Technology. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.