Image from proaudiotraining.com.
I’m sick of hearing about guaranteed impressions. Scratch that. I’m sick of hearing about guaranteed impressions as a stand-alone success metric for marketing campaign evaluations. Know what I mean?
Maybe you do, but for those who don’t, let me start by defining the term. Guaranteed impressions are a metric that has been a staple of paid media for a while now. When your marketing department buys a print or display ad, or puts an ad on TV or radio, the sites, publications or orgs they’re buying from guarantee a number of people who are going to “see” the placement.
CMOs and all executives for that matter have historically loved guaranteed impressions. Quite often they come in as big numbers, in the millions depending on from whom you’re buying. They look good on a bar graph and pop in red font on a scorecard.
But guaranteed impressions can come across as false advertising to your clients, company and leadership about what your efforts are actually bringing to the table. Think about it:
- Just because I bought an ad in the local newspaper, does that mean everybody who gets the paper actually saw it? Of course not.
- Just because I placed an ad on a website that gets 300,000 visits a month, does that mean everybody noticed it or thought about it? Um, no. In fact, there is interesting research about how few people actually look at the ads on Google when conducting a search. And those are ads showing when the user doesn’t know for what he/she is looking.
- Just because I created an ad and bought time on a TV or radio show, does that mean everyone watching that program watched or listened to my commercial? Sorry, not even close. Thanks to DVR and channel switching, even fewer people are watching those commercials than in recent history.
Now it may sound like I’m saying print, display, radio and TV ads have no merit. But I’m not. I’m not one of those PR pros who’s all about earned and social media opportunities and thinks traditional marketing is a waste of money. Heck, we misrepresent earned PR placements when we quote the circulation number as how many people saw a magazine story, for example. What I want you to walk away with here is that guaranteed impressions are only one piece of the puzzle, one side of the story. And bigger numbers don’t necessarily mean better.
Let me ask you a question. What’s more beneficial to your business in an offline setting? A chance to give your business pitch and pass out your cards to a large group of people you don’t know or the chance to sit down face-to-face with one, two or three professionals, get to know them better, understand their business and build a relationship?
If you said the former, I don’t think you’re being honest with yourself. If you said the latter, the same is true online. Social media can provide us guarantees that impressions just can’t bring – guaranteed opportunity to listen to someone’s perspective, have a conversation and to target your relationships.
I can’t guarantee social media will solve all your business problems. In fact, I can likely guarantee that a mix of social and traditional tactics integrated to meet your overall objectives and goals will likely be the best approach. But one thing I will guarantee – marketers who keep guaranteeing impressions and going are going to start losing leadership’s trust. And you know what, they should. Because they aren’t telling all sides of the measurement story.
[...] This post was mentioned on Twitter by Lauren Fernandez, JGoldsborough and Rich Pulvino, Elissa Freeman. Elissa Freeman said: RT @cubanalaf: If you're a PR pro, you should read this. "Guaranteed impressions" = lame. Good post by @jgoldsborough http://bit.ly/ib4hUr [...]
[...] This post was mentioned on Twitter by Heather Whaling, JGoldsborough. JGoldsborough said: @prtini Hey Heather, I just mentioned you in my comment on "What does a guaranteed impression actually guarantee?": http://fyre.it/ru [...]