Hasta La Creative!

Measuring online advertising today is like trying to boil a swimming pool with a Bunsen burner. It’s hard. It’s hard for a number of reasons, but the most difficult one — and one which the industry is finally just beginning to recognize — is that measurement today is about cookies, not people. Cookies don’t cut it any more. It’s imperative that we move toward people-based measurement — and soon. People-based measurement gives marketers both accuracy and transparency, and has the added benefit of eliminating wasteful spending.

Back in the mid-1990s, when a fully tricked-out Dell sold for $4,400, very few people owned more than one computer. Forget about the fact that smartphones were still a decade out from being developed. At the time, the cookie was a reasonable approximation of a person for measurement purposes because most people were associated with a single browser and a single device.

Fast forward to 2014. Many of us now have a computer at both home and work, a tablet at home, and a device in our pocket. Using these devices, we now access the web through a myriad of apps and browsers, each one creating digital cookie crumbs for advertisers. There is no guaranteed link between these devices that gives marketers an idea of your interests and demographics. Because one cookie is dropped per browser, per device, cookie-based measurement on its own is misleading at best.

Continue reading at AdAge.com