#013: Musings on the Measurement of Display Media

The following is a straight-up machine translation. It has not been human-reviewed or human-corrected. However, we did replace the original transcription, produced in 2017, with an updated one produced using OpenAI’s WhisperX in 2025, which, trust us, is much, much better than the original. Still, we apologize on behalf of the machines for any text that winds up being incorrect, nonsensical, or offensive. We have asked the machine to do better, but it simply responds with, “I’m sorry, Dave. I’m afraid I can’t do that.”

00:00:04.89 [Announcer]: Welcome to the Digital Analytics Power Hour. Three analytics pros and the occasional guest discussing digital analytics issues of the day. Find them on Facebook at facebook.com forward slash analytics hour. And now the Digital Analytics Power Hour.

00:00:25.67 [Michael Helbling]: Welcome to the Digital Analytics Power Hour. This is Episode 13. Well thanks everyone for joining us. We’re very excited, our 13th show. This means we’ve been doing this podcast for exactly one half of a year. Thanks for listening and being a part of it. This show, we’re talking about an exciting topic, measuring display media. Everybody’s got it? Nobody’s good at measuring it. What are we talking about? We’re talking about display. You know, there’s the famous quote, I know half of my advertising budget is wasted. I just don’t know which half. Well, you’re about to find out. Joining me tonight are my co-hosts, Tim Wilson from Columbus, Ohio, is a partner at WebAnalytics Domestified, and Jim Cain, double CEO of Napkyn and Babbage Systems. And I’m Michael Helbling. I lead the analytics practice at Search Discovery in Atlanta, Georgia. Gentlemen, welcome.

00:01:25.13 [Tim Wilson]: Hey, Michael. Hey, Jim.

00:01:28.01 [Michael Helbling]: Hello. Well guys, display advertising, tons of money behind it, and frankly we probably all think measurement is done poorly most of the time. What are we going to do about it?

00:01:40.96 [Tim Wilson]: Well, I, as the one who lobbied hard for this topic because I have such a love hate and largely hate relationship with display. Maybe I can, I can start and I’m not exactly where to start, except maybe part of it is framing that to me, they’re really, It comes down to sort of two fundamental different ways that display can be used and one of those is kind of in a direct response. I’ve got a call to action come and buy or come and give me your name and get a coupon or become a lead so I can sell you a car. And then the other use of display is more akin to historical TV advertising. And it’s, oh, it’s, it’s awareness. We have a very, we might have a call to action, but mainly we’re just trying to beat you over the head with our brand so that we’re working our way into your awareness and consideration mindset and I feel like display gets sometimes sort of muddled between which of those two in a specific execution it’s trying to be and it’s out there with some strong call to action and it’s initially thought of as some direct response but then when you look at the click-throughs and the conversions on the last click and we can talk about attribution and And that looks terrible compared to every other channel. And then all of a sudden, there’s this pivot to, oh, no, no. Well, we’re just trying to get impressions. We’re just trying to drive awareness of the brand or the messaging. And that just drives me utterly berserk, because you actually have such a misalignment between measures and what you claim you’re trying to do. So that’s kind of an opening salvo.

00:03:27.62 [Michael Helbling]: You’re firmly on the record as being anti-display. Well, I take a softer view. I’ll say this. I think display typically gets either too much credit or not enough. And that might sound contradictory, but that’s usually where it lands. It’s usually in a place where someone is giving it some wackadoo 90-day view through crazy 8s kind of a metrics to pump up its numbers and give it credit for everything that ever happened under the sun. or it’s that one-to-one direct response model where it never performs because displayed by its very nature is just not a transactional type of media. I would say good display builds consideration and if you have great advertising, if you have great creative, you’re going to build consideration with that advertising.

00:04:19.53 [Tim Wilson]: I think you are, if you are really going heavy on display, like I feel like what will happen is you run some, put some heavy into TV and you do a little bit of display and all of a sudden display looks awesome because people are theoretically getting exposed to your ads on digital, but they’re really getting exposed in TV and they come to your site and hey, they’ve got a pixel. It might not even have been a viewable impression. When it comes to the impact of the impression and we were talking a little bit before at my class that you said you weren’t really familiar with this you don’t know if Jim you ever heard of the zoo their own by Nelson now you know Tim. explain it to us. Well, so to me, this is such a simple concept and it’s been around for years and I had the fortune of a client and their media agency kind of surprised me and actually ran a Vizu study. So you’ve got list studies where you say, oh, we’re doing dynamic logics or something. It takes months after the campaign’s run. You get these very crude measures. Vizu is a very simple, simple concept and that is a one question in Banner survey. So they carve off a portion of the media buy. And a lot of times it can be just like value add by the, you know, as part of the buy. And they carve off a portion of that buy. And because they’ve got people pixeled, they know who has been exposed and who has not been exposed to the ad and how many times, you know, through their network. So one of the times, instead of serving up the ad, they’ll serve up this awareness or consideration or purchase intent question, in Banner, one survey, and you’re like, well, not everybody is going to click the survey or, you know, that’s fine, so there are challenges with surveys, but they’ll ask. They’ll ask a question, you know, which of these brands are you familiar with or, you know, this message. And they’ll have an unbranded survey to ask a question And because they’ll be getting responses, they have to have, I think like 100 responses is what they normally put it at, something like that. And they will then have effectively conducted a testing control environment where they are asking people who they know have been exposed to the, have had the ad served up. And they will also ask people that is, you know, from their records, the ad has not been served up. And then they’ll look at the lift between those measures and can say, yes, the people who’ve been exposed, there’s a 10% lift, or if they’ve been exposed three times. And they can get that down at the creative level and they get it in a very timely, you know, just like we’re used to getting with live analytics, they get the data very timely, reasonably granularly. And it kind of drives me berserk if somebody is doing a saying, oh, this is about branding, we’re driving awareness, we got 10 million impressions. I’m like, well, if you got 10 million impressions, I want to know what was the lift in brand recall that you got or the lift in purchase intent that you got. between the people who were exposed to that ad versus the ones who weren’t and what frustrates me is that that is kind of on the media agency to do that and they can optimize their creative they can optimize their placements with that data but a lot of times they seem sort of reluctant to do it and it was great like this week actually saw one where it was fantastic like they’ve done it and they actually got great results and I was like This is the same frustration with people not wanting to measure their websites or being reluctant to put KVIs down to say, look, if this is what you’re measuring, there is a platform out there. I’m getting nothing from Nielsen. I have no relationship with them. But the handful of times that I’ve managed to get through and we’ve used Vizu, it’s been very, very eye-opening and super useful.

00:08:10.66 [Jim Cain]: So my initial two cents is you get a bunch of digital analysts in a room And there we’ll start being bitching about display and about vendors and agencies that sell display. We did it right before we started recording this show. And if you look at the Interactive Advertising Bureau or the IAB, it’s huge and it’s extremely well-funded and it has a lobby group in Washington. If you look at the DAA or the Digital Analytics Association, It’s about 5,000 of us, and we periodically have a lobby bar in San Francisco. The level of influence and the level of budget that goes to measurement is significantly smaller than what goes to advertising. The IAB now has a digital data certification. So through the IAB, they will teach you how to measure and show data that helps someone understand their advertising and their display budget. If you try and explain that to a web analyst or a digital analyst whose job is to understand how everything is connected to everything else, it comes off as a little bit ignorant. You know, we’re looking at the holistic health of the body and they’re kind of doing podiatry because we only sell shoes.

00:09:26.58 [Tim Wilson]: But that’s not a good point that if you look at where that budget, because you look at the scale, which is a great point, But it’s coming from, like, display is more of an offshoot of TV. And if you take the dollars you can spend on TV advertising, and then what it takes to get a ton of impressions, way more visits than you’re going to get to your website. So there is this kind of going from TV all the way to the web. And I think when you get to the site, it’s kind of seen as this sort of free thing. And so we kind of scrap to say we need to invest in the site, but still when it comes to marketing budgets, what they’re actually spending on advertising. If you’re spending on TV, that sort of dwarfs everything. And then if you take in absolute terms what’s going to digital advertising, and maybe that’s paid search and display, those of us sitting just on the website We’re looking at that saying, well, that’s still a massive number, but it’s kind of small compared to the TV budget. So I think you’re onto something and that if you’re coming at it from a TV perspective and how horribly unmeasurable, you know, Nielsen and how messy and noisy that data is, there’s this belief With anybody coming from that mentality that your display is so much more measurable, because you can count the specific number of impressions. Whether they’re viewable or not, it’s a little harder to count, and people are trying to do that. Whether they’re being click-botted to the end of the earth so they’re not real clicks, that’s a little bit harder too. But we look at it on the website and say, visit is certainly more reliable than a click. They’re looking at me saying a click is certainly more reliable than an extrapolated Nielsen box that’s trying to estimate in the world of time-shifted viewing. So I think that that may be it. You’re kind of got two different perspectives of how good is this measurement.

00:11:21.39 [Jim Cain]: Yeah. And the other part is, is that as digital analysts and people who are digital marketers, we have it just like you said, like trying to measure TV, forget it. We’ve had it relatively easy in terms of being able to measure digital marketing campaigns in general, because most of them would be the equivalent of direct marketing. AdWords show a message. Did they click it? That’s all the counts. Email sent a message. Did they open it? Did they click it? And I think display needs to be considered as an aspect of a much more significant multi-touch campaign and not a campaign on its own. And sometimes that’s hard to wrap your head around. Secondarily, I think that sometimes digital marketers have gone, I get an extra $20 million kicking around because we’re a huge company, and I’ll buy a whole bunch of display because it’s like paid search, right? And the guy who does it.

00:12:12.59 [Tim Wilson]: Which is interesting, right? With paid search, you’re partially buying on keywords. you can have some context around what were they looking for. And there’s some rules and controls that you can’t just march completely off the reservation with what you’re trying to push them towards. Whereas display, you’re buying audiences that have affinities based on behavior or the content of the site that they’re on. Like it’s just inherently to me, it’s a looser connection. You’re still trying to get your targeted display, but then that’s why people jump to retargeting, and they say, oh, they’re retargeting. I know they’ve done something. They’ve been to my site. They’ve done something where they’ve expressed some interest. And look, retargeting all of a sudden magically does get higher click-through rates. It costs more, but higher conversion and and that logically makes sense. I’m not anti-retargeting, although REI and E-metrics, those are the ads that I get that I’m like, yep, that is retargeting.

00:13:14.77 [Michael Helbling]: Just visit searchdiscovery.com sometime, we retarget like a mofo.

00:13:21.17 [Tim Wilson]: I’ll save you a couple of bucks and not go there. There you go.

00:13:25.13 [Michael Helbling]: Yeah, I tend to like retargeting over just sort of, hey, let’s throw some display advertising out there. And because it’s not analogous to television, right? With television, we kind of have a sense for who’s watching, even with DVR and fast forwarding commercials and that sort of thing. It’s people still see the advertisements, you know, it’s well proven that there’s a lot of banner blindness out there, which is why media and creative has to really stand out if you’re going to do run of the mill or brand based advertising. But retargeting feels more relevant. And what I’ve seen, we’ve seen a lot better results from using retargeting and also using DMPs and things like that to build audiences to do targeted display too. So not retargeting, but targeted display is another area where I think, and that’s why you see DMPs just being, I’m blowing up, like they’re like some of the fastest growing digital companies right now.

00:14:24.70 [Jim Cain]: Sorry, just to clarify what you’re talking about is what other people would call programmatic display, right, Michael?

00:14:30.47 [Michael Helbling]: Well, programmatic, I’m bad at defining things. Programmatic is more like I give like a system a set of rules and it’ll automatically optimize within that set of rules. Targeted display to me is just sort of I find lookalikes across the internet. So I have, you know, hey, all these people visited my website and I’m going to use the DMP to tie other attributes like 30% of all my purchasers happen to drive Volkswagen’s. Now I want to target every Volkswagen driver out there and see how many more I could get to my web, that kind of stuff doing segmentation and look like targeting.

00:15:06.21 [Tim Wilson]: But it’s one of those where like you say programmatic that imply you start saying machine learning and an AI and it’s an easy sell and it’s an easy play for venture capital, for acquisitions. All the big players have bought something that’s a DMP and I’ve got a CPG client where the head of analytics is kind of on a tear to say, okay, you told me that you’re doing this, but still how are they paying the agency? They’re paying them a cut of the media spend. So the way they won the business was we are going to spend your dollars wisely and we’re going to do programmatic and we’re going to optimize throughout the year. But the fact is once you’ve set a budget, they’re just getting a cut of that. And then they have to be able to tell some sort of story about how it got better. And the more that he digs in, because it’s actually complicated, right? People have this vision that Oh, I have all this data. It’s all in a DMP. I can look for all the Volkswagen drivers. So it’s like it’s a good story, but the complexity that comes with that when you start making those buys to then say, well, I still need to figure out, is it working or not? And how am I measuring whether it’s working or not? And do I have that loop closed programmatically, or am I having to do it manually? So I think, I mean, that’s a whole other issue that I think there’s the story, the hype around programmatic, the hype around DMPs, I think is, I mean, honestly, the hype around web analytics, all of those are exceeding their reality. So I don’t think, I don’t think site-side analytics is necessarily any better, but if you’re not actually closing the loop and saying, how am I measuring if this is successful, which is where attribution comes along and says, oh, the only way you’re going to know if it’s successful is if you collect massive amounts more data and hit the magic button on our System which is going to take this wildly messy data and tell you whether it’s more successful or not But at the end of the day you’re like based on what like what is your end of the day conversion? You know and if you’re selling shoes online Sure, that is a reasonably low consideration purchase. I can see multiple touches on one device leading to some direct response stuff to a purchase. But there’s a ton of display out there that’s not doing that. And there are companies buying the technology to do attribution. And they don’t have a conversion that they can really feed into that system.

00:17:39.47 [Jim Cain]: On the point that you made, Tim, that was a good one, you said, the agency that’s doing the analytics, and by the way, this is not a statement about the quality of their analysts or the work that they do, but the contractual relationship they had with the customer was as a percentage of spend. So their mandate as an organization is to increase spend as much as possible and not get fired. It’s very hard to be a good analyst when that’s your mandate. And I find that as analysts who literally just do data, our mandate is pure offense. Like how do we come up with clean actionable insights to grow the business? And display analytics tend to be owned by the seller of the display and they tend to be defense. How do we protect the customer? How do we grow the budget? And I think that’s another kind of DAA versus IAB West Side Story thing.

00:18:32.61 [Tim Wilson]: I don’t disagree. Site-side analysts have a bias towards the web analytics platform, and I have said more times than I care to count that, you know what, if Google or Adobe didn’t see the visit, if they weren’t on the page long enough for the page to load and for the JavaScript to execute, then I don’t really think they visited. You know, if they bounced before it even got read, Whereas you’re counting a click, which was the point that you passed through some redirect and logged it on your server. So I expect some falloff in that situation, but it does seem like there are cases more often than not where the media side analysts, their system, their universe, what they can control, is counting to the point of the click and then maybe reading pixels that got deployed on the site. But that sort of friction occurs and I can understand why it’s happening and I can understand where my bias lies. but it doesn’t mean that it doesn’t wind up with a lot of potential for finger pointing and a kind of a fractious relationship between parties.

00:19:42.45 [Jim Cain]: Well, and, you know, again, I’ve never had the opportunity to really take even digital, a really big multifaceted marketing campaign, like it’s our spring launch. And we’re going to do this kind of display in these 10 emails and these locally targeted AdWords ads, but they’re all thematically similar. and measure them all together, which is a much more traditional big marketing campaign measurement program. We tend to focus more at the channel level because people could do that traditional marketing campaign level roll up. I have a feeling I’d be going, we need to get a lot smarter at display and who can I talk to? So again, I’m not necessarily just shitting on agencies. I think that we need to start as analysts thinking about campaigns as not, yeah, I sent an email, but this is a significant organizational marketing push, and that’s complicated stuff, you know?

00:20:39.14 [Tim Wilson]: feel like to that point of kind of viewing as a multi-channel. I’ve done this. I’ve played this role a little bit as an analyst, not on massive, massive cross-channel campaigns, but playing the role of somebody sitting down and saying, are we even thinking through how we expect these different things to work together? And this will be maybe the analysts being the heretic, but that just putting conscious thought into that and saying we’re not going to be able to measure exactly which one of these things did work or not, we’re going to be able to measure the overall success of the campaign, I think would be higher value more often than not than saying we’re just going to assume that’s kind of happening and we’re going to try to measure something that is largely immeasurable, which is the incremental contribution of each display relative to the TV, relative to the email, relative to the paid search.

00:21:34.78 [Michael Helbling]: I’m going to say something that I’ve only said to one person out loud about media or display and sort of my thoughts on it, at least as it pertains to like attribution and that kind of stuff.

00:21:46.76 [Jim Cain]: You know, we’re recording this, right?

00:21:48.52 [Michael Helbling]: Yeah, I know. And the other person I told about was June Dershowitz. I just threw it past her one time and she looked at me like I was kind of crazy. And probably I am. But I kind of think that there’s also sort of a sunk cost to advertising, like, a sunk cost to servers to run my internet website. You know what I mean? Like, I have to do some advertising, otherwise I will have zero customers, right? Or I can depend on word of mouth only, and that is one way to grow a business, but if I want to grow my business beyond that, there’s an amount of advertising that I have to do. You know, so in some senses, like running a display campaign is something that just kind of has to happen. And I don’t want to be somebody who says, hey, let’s not measure this. But let’s understand that if we look at sort of a customer lifecycle map, like my new customers coming in and my old customers going out, like measuring turn and new customer acquisition and those kinds of things, when I look at my world like that, the way that display fits into that is very much around how I get new customers into the funnel. It’s a very high top of the funnel activity. That’s about gaining attention and driving awareness and consideration towards. the new customer or I guess the retained customer.

00:23:07.44 [Tim Wilson]: Except for retargeting, right? Retargeting, kind of by definition, they’re beyond awareness by the time you’re retargeting them, right?

00:23:13.97 [Michael Helbling]: Yeah, that’s fair unless I’m doing lookalike targeting, which is not retargeting. But yeah, if they’ve done something to interact with me before, but it’s still kind of moving down the funnel, right? It’s sort of like if they’ve come to my site and shown intent, And then while I’m browsing the web, while I’m listening to Tim talk, I’m seeing Zappos show me a shoe that I looked at a couple of days ago. It’s a retargeting campaign. The other thing I was going to say, so there’s my crazy notion that out there someday history will prove me right. I believe that.

00:23:45.39 [Tim Wilson]: I don’t disagree with you. I mean, I will quickly say I don’t disagree with you. I think aiming for more precision on measurement as opposed to saying we have to spend it and what are the things we can reasonably do? Can we use a tool to try to estimate viewable impressions? Because if the impression is not viewable, then it can’t possibly be helping you.

00:24:06.42 [Michael Helbling]: Absolutely do that if all of the publishers would use a really high quality tag management tool. It would be no problem.

00:24:15.01 [Tim Wilson]: Well, yeah, we’ll use that to throw in just because anybody who hasn’t hasn’t didn’t see the ad age. She was kind of a big splat. I mean, ad age carried others did when Kraft maybe like a year ago, less than a year where Kraft said they like came out and said they reject like 75 to 85 percent of their digital ad impressions due to quality concerns. And I think that was viewability and ghost clicks. You know, and I think saying, hey, we think this is happening. What can we do now to try to figure out Can we pull up the sites that we’re advertising on, you know, get back from, say, I know it’s the network and you’re pushing out the network, but show me where the impressions have been, and I’ll look at some of them and say, this is ridiculous. Let’s start blacklisting these. Let’s sit down once a month. and blacklist sites that just make no sense for us to be advertising on. Without trying to get to the point of saying, no, we’re going to wait for the data to magically tell us exactly what the contribution was, and we’re going to do it magically through the data. So I actually think I agree with what you’re saying, or I just completely misinterpreted it to my own ends.

00:25:14.83 [Michael Helbling]: No, let’s keep going down that path. I like it. No, I’m just kidding.

00:25:19.38 [Jim Cain]: You know that the sunk marketing cost thing that you’re talking about Michael is really just how do we tie display back into cost of sale like you’re still thinking like an analyst you’re not saying some things are just truth and we should hope and Advertising just works like you’re saying we need to measure it It’s not a last pass the post attribution model, but if you turn off all your display and you’re a huge brand, it’s not going to be a good idea. It ties back to something. You guys are normally really good at educating me on these podcasts by referencing Chris Berry wrote a blog post. This person wrote a book. I read an interesting thing in here. It has a web analyst. ever approached this issue in a really detailed way before, and you, like, loved it. And if not, who would you want to write the article?

00:26:10.00 [Michael Helbling]: I mean, there’s differing views of that. Somebody I’ve read a lot who does quite a bit of work in talking about this is probably Kevin Hillstrom and talking about multi-channel. Surprisingly, he’s kind of down on the omnichannel idea, but only down on the hype surrounding it as opposed to, you know, whether or not it’s meaningful. Mindthatdata.com is a good site for anybody to read. I don’t know. What about you, Tim?

00:26:34.76 [Tim Wilson]: It seems very, very rare to me for a web analyst to jump over to the media side or vice versa. So part of the reason I wanted to talk about it, I feel like nobody really wants to face it head on or can’t figure out how to face it head on. And the IAB versus DAA is a pretty crystallized way to frame why that may be.

00:26:57.41 [Jim Cain]: Do you guys think we could put some peer pressure on Mr. Novo to take this on? He seems like the right guy.

00:27:03.55 [Michael Helbling]: Oh, actually, you know what? You bring up C. Yeah, that’s what I would have said.

00:27:07.79 [Tim Wilson]: Yeah. I don’t think I can talk to you about that. I don’t think we could put peer pressure on him. He’s a fairly independent thinker.

00:27:17.06 [Jim Cain]: It just seems like he’s right down over the middle of the plate for him to go. Here’s what it means. Here’s where it fits. Here’s how you measure it.

00:27:25.73 [Tim Wilson]: Come think of it. He’s actually the one who the first time actually started to believe that attribution could work was actually a presentation he gave. I think more talking, explaining kind of the, you have to, you have to have a holdout, right? That’s the only way you can really do attribution is you have to have some level of holdout and it’s tough to do with, with display. But yes, this is our, the digital analytics power hour requests that Jim Novo tackle that head on.

00:27:55.49 [Jim Cain]: All 70 of our listeners, please contact Mr. Novo on Twitter.

00:27:59.58 [Michael Helbling]: That’s right. Time for you to come out of retirement, Jim. Dust off the ROI spreadsheets that I found on the internet when I first started in analytics that were basically solving this problem. The other one that I thought of, and I think I tend toward a more adversarial view to display, but there’s a good blog out there called Adcontrarian, who I find refreshing. Check that out too. All right, so let’s wrap up. Here’s how we’re going to do it. Each of us tomorrow, we’re starting a new and exciting job as the director of internet advertising or marketing for a large agency. First thing we’re going to do is sort out our display capabilities. What’s the first couple of things on your agenda as you start into that? Go.

00:28:44.02 [Tim Wilson]: So I’ll, I’ll run first. I think that I am first going to get crystal clear on where I, I’m going to, I’m going to draw ideas. It’s going to be on a whiteboard and I’m going to get the people in the room who have opinions on it as to where display actually fits in our, Well, it’s going to be the selling cycle, although I may talk about it as the buying cycle thing. So I’m going to say, where do we think display is? And then I’m going to go straight to that and say, what can we reasonably measure? And what are we comfortable with kind of taking on faith? And I’m going to try to set expectations really, really clearly that there’s a lot of technology out there, but there’s a lot that’s really expensive that Mary may not actually pay off when it comes to to measurement i’m gonna find what i can measure in the near term but i’m gonna be super rigorous i’m not gonna measure somebody on cpm when they’re bidding on cpm and i give them a fixed budget cuz that’s that’s just ludicrous and happens but i’m gonna really map to if they say we’re driving awareness i’m gonna say well then how are we gonna be measuring the awareness lift and what you’re contributing. But I’m probably going to keep it still fairly channel siloed and not get caught up in the multi-channel hype. Jim, what are you going to do?

00:30:01.85 [Jim Cain]: The very first thing I’m going to do is really take a strong emphasis on starting to think about the concept of the campaign. And it’s funny because Tim, until today, I didn’t realize that you had such a hate on for attribution. It’s another topic for another day, but attribution can be like big data as a concept, but kind of thinking about the waiting for the types of marketing campaigns or marketing mediums and actions we do as part of an overall together, but I would immediately start thinking about the weighting of every type of digital marketing that we do and bring it together into a theme or a campaign. So for example, you guys have holidays in the year that are big sales holidays. If I’m a big brand, I’m doing email display, retargeted display, AdWords, offline marketing, all around come to my website and buy something. So rather than thinking of display as a thing, I would start to really figure out how to rationalize it as a successful part of an overall marketing initiative. And just like Michael said earlier, who was talking about holdout testing or what I call control testing. Yeah, I mean those two things together gives me the ability to look at a holistic digital marketing campaign against cost per action. And then I think I would really be able to do some cool stuff with display, but as a standalone, it would be a big expensive mess.

00:31:29.16 [Tim Wilson]: And just to quickly defend myself, I’m not a total, I mean, I am bearish on attribution as it can be applied to any business at any time. I think there, I think it really is contingent on. the business and the business model and the industry, but I think attribution is totally doable in some scenarios, but that is a topic for another podcast.

00:31:50.34 [Michael Helbling]: Take a stand, Tim. Come on. Take a stand.

00:31:53.71 [Jim Cain]: I’m taking a stand that there are lots of places that are thinking that we’re going to be able to… In our next episode, called Tim Wilson, Last Click Apologist,

00:32:07.51 [Michael Helbling]: Here’s I actually had a set of steps and then I’m going to change them because of what one of the things Tim said, which is probably the first thing to do is figure out how the organization perceives display because you could walk into an organization that is pretty focused on direct response. And display just doesn’t get any attention or love because you can’t measure it last click. Or you walk into an organization where, you know, so take the temperature of the organization. I think that’s a really great first step. And then educate from there about getting more sophisticated. I think that’s, that’s what I do. And then I look at how do we incorporate strategies that are going to give us lift, but build a model that shows us, here’s how display fits into our customer model. Here’s how we’re going to understand display as distinctly different in its impact versus response channels like email or search or things like that. And then go to town spending the money. It’s probably why no one is jumping over themselves to hire me to do this job. That is OK. This has been interesting. I think as digital analysts through and through, this is not our sweet spot as a topic. And so I think there’s a ton that we could learn from our listeners. So if you’re out there and you’re listening to this and you’re shaking your head like, oh, you guys have got it all wrong, this is a great time for you to jump on our Facebook page or on Twitter. Let us know your thoughts. Join us on the Measure Slack group. If you’re not a member of that already, I’d love to hear from you there. and give us some of your thoughts on this topic. We’d love to hear from you. Thanks again for listening for myself and for our co-host Tim Wilson and Jim Cain. We thank you and thanks for listening.

00:33:57.52 [Announcer]: Thanks for listening and don’t forget to join the conversation on Facebook or Twitter. We welcome your comments and questions. Facebook.com forward slash analytics hour or at analytics hour on Twitter. Those smart guys wanted to fit in, so they made up a term called analytics. Analytics don’t work.

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