What should we measure - cause or effect?

Media is possibly the only domain that has so much research and measurement data available. No other product or service can boast of a measurement system that offers a minute-by-minute relay of the consumption patterns (TAM and AMap) or of a sample survey that is over a 2 lakh sample size which has been conducted every year for more than a decade (IRS) or of a database that records the details of almost every transasction in the domain (Adex). And, there is much more.

So, while there is a lot of reseach measurement available, here, I want to examine if these measures are relevant and appropriate or not. In the marketing-media ecosystem, there are two kinds of measures which can be identified. Lets understand the possibilities that exist and then discuss the pros and cons of each method.

The first type of measures are the "cause" measures. This includes measurement of phenomena that are an input to the marketing ecosystem; that are the stimuli in the marketing system. In a way, this is like measuring the "effort" that is exerted. The Reach, OTS and GRP measures are primarily measures of the media inputs that are being invested by the brand and hence are all "cause" or "stimulus" or "effort" measure.

The other type of measures are the "effect" measures such as sales, awareness, brand image, footfalls, etc. These represent the actions or the mindset of the consumers and hence are an indicator of what is the "result" of the various media and marketing efforts. 

In the days of, scarce media and when the brand choices of customers too were limited; there was a high correlation between the "input" and the "result". Hence, measuring either of them would give the brand manager an idea about the success of the brand. In such a scenario, since measurement of the "effort" was far easier, all the media measurement systems then set up are merely measures of the "input effort". Till recently, these measures served us well. But, the media landscape has changed a lot now.

The compexity in the media landscape and the huge clutter of advertising communication has eroded the effectiveness of conventional advertising. The gap between the "effort" and the "effect" has widened. More and more clients are asking agencies to show the "effect" rather than the "effort". It is quite another matter that due to low sample sizes etc of the research even the actual value of the "effort" is often debated upon. It is an accepted practice that the agency has to provide the measurement of "effort" while the measurement of "effect" is the responsibility of the client.

The Clients are at varying degrees of readiness when it somes to having the "effect" data. These range from those who are not even able to provide regular, systematic data on sales to those who have extensive data on customer interactions with their call-centres, awareness track information, walk-in data, website traffic data, etc. Most of these are data are not captured with the objective of understanding the impact of media and hence are often either not suitable to understand the media impact or need a lot of "massaging" before any inference can be derived. There is no standardization of the indicators of communication "effect" and the efficacy of advertising and communication is diagnosed basis "whatever available" sets of data.

More and more communication design is being linked to such "effect" data but there is a lot of ground to be covered. There has to be a joint effort from the the clients and agencies both to agree upon and setup "effect" data capture systems that are targeted to capture the effect of media.

A lot of discussion happens on "ROI" and if really we want to walk the talk then the frst step is to define "ROI" measures and start measuring them. Lets measure what we want to deliver instead of just delivering what is available to be measured.