Jon Gibs

The internet is in an increasingly funny place. We’ve developed a media that allows an extraordinary amount of targeting and advertising measurement structures previously unheard of in other media. We track impressions, ad engagement, clicks, view-throughs, conversions, post-buy demographics, time per ad, branding effect and offline ROI. We can measure, and even plan by, just about any construct an advertiser would like.

The funny part is we can’t seem to get our head around GRPs. This is something I’ve written about in some length in the past and it boils down to this, for any given site, the reach and frequency is probably so low that you produce barely readable GRPs. If you assume that any given media plan is made up of quite a few of these sites, when you mix this level of fragmentation with a blunt instrument like GRPs, you derive little value. It’s not that the calculation itself is so hard (pretty simple multiplication); it’s the fact that it is not very meaningful to most of us online people.

However, GRPs are meaningful to offline media and this is where the problem lies. There is a demand by offline planners to create a similar online metric to those used by TV buyers. We might think that this is a blunt force metric, but it is the tool used by the people that plan most of the advertising dollars in the US.

So where does this leave us? Do we use GRPs online? Yes. Do we like it? No. Do we keep using the online metrics we currently do? Sort of, reach is becoming increasingly irrelevant. As TV changes do they incorporate more online like metrics? Absolutely.

This is the very topic we will be picking up on the panel: “Defining the New Media Currency: How to Bring Traditional Media Metrics Online” at Ad:Tech San Francisco in a couple weeks. It should be a great discussion; we have folks from QuantCast, TNS and the always brilliant Young Bean Song from Atlas. If you’re at Ad:Tech come on by and say hi, hopefully we’ll avoid the fist fights this time.