Reach. Resonance. Reaction. These are the 3 equally important goals of any Marketing effort, no matter how big or small.

With Traditional marketing, Reach is relatively easy to measure and is fairly reliable; just check with Nielsen or ComScore and know for example that the program you purchased did a 1 RTG A1849 (or, roughly 1.3 Million Adults 1849 saw a commercial). Measurements are taken on an average quarter hour basis, with 5 minutes being the minimum viewing time needed to count toward the average. What happens from there is much, much murkier. Did the commercial Resonate? What did each of those 1.3 Million folks think about the ad? Was it received well? Did it go in one ear and out the other? Did it touch a nerve? Did anyone laugh…talk about it… file it in a memory bank somewhere? Will they get off the couch and hurry to the store? Will they order online? Hard to tell. You see people are like snowflakes, and to obtain the sum total of all the stimulation created by a TV or Radio commercial is not within the realm of possibility. But maybe by observing what happens to foot traffic at a store or “sales velocity” (how quickly things ‘fly’ off the shelf) we can deduce that there was any Resonance at all. Hmm, that will pose a problem too. There are countless factors that could have influenced a purchase decision. Every brain processes and stores information in its own way. Every interpretation, memory and recall is unique. It can be weeks, months, even years down the road, until a consumer is in a Supermarket packed with over 30,000 products when a short cut to decision making occurs in an instant; a product jumps off the shelf and comes to life as a result of an ad seen long ago. “Mental Availability” or the ability to make us remember the brand at the point of purchase is the secret weapon of mass marketing. It also so happens to be totally unproveable. Thanks to the mystical inner workings of cognition, Resonance and Reaction are more or less impossible to measure in any meaningful way.

Online advertising on the other hand is different. ½ the planet is online, so Reach shouldn’t be an issue. Clicking on a banner ad is proof positive that an ad was motivating enough for someone to take an action. With online advertising, we can finally justify ad budgets once and for all. Right!? (Insert loud buzzing noise) WRONG!! Online, Reach and Reaction are loosely defined, exaggerated, insignificant or an outright fabrication. Audience numbers are questionable at best, but even the accurate ones pale in comparison to TV. For example, it takes 3000+ YouTube channels over 31 days to match the reach of 6 Broadcast networks over 5 days. Online videos only need to play for :02 (after which time they are skipped) and only need to partially fill a screen in order to be counted. A banner ad is counted as “Reaching” when it is sent by an ad server, not by when it is acknowledged by a person. Click through rates are at near 5 in 10,000; probably a generous number considering that 60% of all mobile clicks are by mistake. All this is not including criminal activity, which when you count that, is responsible for $7.2 Billion in fake Reach and Reaction (audiences, views, clicks and the like) according to the ANA. The online ads that do make it inside a persons’ head are hardly engaging and persuading, but rather, enraging and perturbing. Digital advertising bombards consumers with thousands of often irrelevant ads a day, subjecting them to endless load times, pop-ups, overpopulating screens and news feeds while tracking them with cookies and beacons that are unwelcome if not despised – which then result in ad blockers growing 40% annually. How’s that for a Reaction?

The reason digital advertising has had so much success for marketing companies and not Marketers is because it promised to track and measure the entire “consumer journey”, from Reach to Resonance to Reaction and draw a straight line between advertising and sales. What was originally a value proposition turned out to be an Achilles heel.

Meanwhile the lure of Attribution and Accountability was too great for budgets not to migrate to digital and in the end, those budgets have funded the formulation of a funny fact: We know Mass Marketing works even without conclusive evidence and with abundant evidence can conclude that online advertising doesn’t.