March 31, 2010

"Ground-Breaking" Baloney

It looks like online ad sales organizations are getting desperate. Their research is starting to look almost as dubious as traditional ad research.

Earlier this week I read a press release entitled .Fox Networks and comScore Reveal Ground-Breaking Findings About the Branding Impact of Online Advertising which claimed that...
".Fox Networks (pronounced “dot-fox”), the leading global online network from Fox International Channels (FIC) and comScore, a leader in measuring the digital world, today unveiled the findings of a ground-breaking U.K. study."
And what did this earth-shattering study prove? I don't know. Something about...
"Research confirms ability of video and display advertising to drive sustained brand engagement regardless of users clicking on ads or not."
In other words, even though no one's clicking on display ads, these ads are still driving "sustained brand engagement" whatever the hell that means.

The release is a masterpiece of obfuscation with no raw data whatsoever, just comparisons. So we don't know how much the advertisers spent, how "sustained brand engagement" is measured, whether there were any sales results, what the ROI was...

Just a few of dicey numbers that can't be analyzed.

More wind-breaking than ground-breaking.

No comments: