Lots and lots of years ago someone realized it wasn’t just a good idea to trade one guy’s wares for another’s.  Money was invented to make these transactions easier by trading a commonly agreed upon currency.  Great idea.  Fast forward to May, 2010, in Miami, FL.

Last week I had the pleasure of attending Compete, Inc’s CMO Summit in Miami. The CEO of one of the major WPP companies suggested that the need to find a common currency for measuring online and its delivery is one of the biggest things holding us back.  Someone also mentioned this while asking a question from the audience.  While developing currency thousands of years ago was a good idea, we still see the value in having various currencies around the world rather than a one-world bank and currency. There is a reason for that, and to suggest we should adopt a single “currency” online, not to mention the fact that it’s the biggest thing holding us back, has got to be one of the scariest and regressive proposed behaviors I’ve ever heard come across in our industry.  There are two major reasons for this.

First, there is a need for currency in general but simplifying everything to one currency suggests that marketers aren’t capable of thinking for themselves.  You see, the people suggesting this point lovingly to the GRP/TRP.  I can’t think of a worse currency in media measurement today.  Sure, it’s universally accepted, but it’s accepting the notion of measuring very little because it’s hard and too costly to do any better.  400 people in a DMA of four million have “people meters” and provide a statistically invalid sample from which hundreds of millions of dollars are spent.  THIS is what we want online?  But let’s just say we look to Nielsen for a system.  They have one!  If you want to target Men 25-54 with HHI of $75k+, then pull a Nielsen report that gives you these sites, and then work with Nielsen to tag your creative and they’ll show you a report of (a much more statistically valid sample, mind you) how you delivered against that audience.  Plan, deliver, report, all by the same people who measure your TRPs.  How much easier does it get?  But wait, there’s more!  You can get this report from comScore, Compete, or even free for Quantcast. Why would we want a monopoly on this system the way the TV GRP measurement system works?  It’s certainly not better for it!

But the above assumes that all you want to measure is audience.  This doesn’t even put a scratch in the surface of the real reasons to use online media.  Right audience or not, DR advertisers have been using online effectively to deliver real ROI for years.  At this point, who cares about GRPs or audience – they’ve got money in the bank! And, how many businesses are identical in that they can use the exact same ROI calculation or eCPA metric?  None.  That is the beauty of online.  You can measure what is exclusively relevant to your business, down to the penny, user, and action.  Sounds just awful.

Remember back in 3^rd grade math class how everyone in the room understood something except “that one kid”? The teacher then had to take time to bring that one child up to speed while the rest couldn’t move along in learning anything new.  This is what we’ll get if we try to get everyone on one common currency: the lowest common denominator.  The metric that is so easy to understand it, even the least advanced CMO can understand it.  Is this really what we want?  If not, correct people when they suggest the need for this common currency.  We don’t need anything made simpler, but rather we need people to identify their business goals they can accomplish with online marketing and develop a plan to meet those goals.

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