Maybe it’s time for radio to produce some vanity metrics.<\/p>\n
Vanity is defined as ‘excessive pride or admiration for one’s appearance or achievements’.<\/p>\n
Vanity metrics look good on paper and make advertisers feel good about their investment but they don’t give advertisers an accurate picture of how successful their advertising is.<\/p>\n
Our friends in digital, flog vanity metrics as if they were the holy grail of advertising, and some of your clients are eating it up.<\/p>\n
Digital vanity metrics include clicks, likes, followers, downloads, subscribers, pages views and more.<\/p>\n
When you think about it, invoicing your clients for ‘spots’ really doesn’t appeal to their vanity. Maybe we should invoice based upon something like ‘estimated impressions.’ Invoicing for 30 spots, isn’t as appealing as invoicing for 5,000 impressions per spot for a total of 150,000 impressions.<\/p>\n
Of course, you know impressions aren’t the final measure of results, in part, because the relevance of the message dictates whether the ‘impressions’ actually produce results. But if you’re dealing with clients who value vanity metrics, maybe you should show impressions or some higher number other than ‘spots’ on their invoice to appeal to their vanity.<\/p>\n
Our new partner at ENS Media, Rick Fink, forwarded the following video link to me. It seems today our toughest selling job is not selling advertisers, it’s selling our sales people. The video at this link unveils the fallacy of digital media metrics, and can help you sell your sellers at your next sales meeting.<\/p>\n