The Click Is Wagging the Dog

Josh Chasin writes for Mediapost: I think ultimately the secret to effective display advertising is that there aren't any secrets, no shortcuts, no magic algorithms. Ultimately there are the same three things that have marked good advertising since the days of Claude Hopkins (look him up): creativity, testing, and measurement. But you have to be sure to measure the right things. Because the Internet is so immediately interactive, we tend to underestimate the communication value of messaging that doesn't immediately produce an interaction. The obvious and classical stimulus-response nature of the click is so eminently measurable, so "on the nose," that we fall into the trap of measuring it, and then stopping measurement. More...