The CEO of DMC despairs at the state of marketing metrics and discusses how marketers can do much better.

It has always amazed me how much money gets pumped into traditional media when, even at the best of times, leading advertising practitioners admitted that only 50 per cent worked -- and they weren’t sure which 50 per cent!

So it's hardly surprising that the marketing profession is being marginalised by businesses looking for bottom line accountability. Life must be even more challenging for client-side marketers now that it's generally accepted that mass marketing is no longer as effective as it was when you had only a 50/50 chance of success. How do marketers assess the relative merits of all the alternative approaches being touted as the answer to their problems? Which ones are worth a punt? Which ones are just mutton being passed off as lamb? If there were some way of comparing apples with apples then life would be so much simpler. But, to compound the headache of fragmented media and multiple alternative marketing techniques, there's now a plethora of competing marketing metrics -- from advocacy to customer satisfaction, engagement, loyalty and more -- to get to grips with.

Perhaps it's naïve for advertisers to have focused so heavily on measuring the means of awareness rather than the ends of economic value. Just because I'm aware of something, doesn't mean I want it (Barry Manilow LP, anyone?). Obviously, expediency means old habits die hard, particularly when you consider online ad measurement or even viral marketing, where advertisers rarely look beyond the topline metric of reach, even though there's so much more useful data they could be using to help justify and refine their efforts. For example, the ability to calculate the cost of acquisition, particularly online, is a major benefit for those seeking evidence of return on investment.

Welcome to the wonderful world of social media where there's an opportunity for brands to go beyond simply mapping traditional marketing models onto the internet, and connect with that all-important subset of influencers who help shape the purchasing decisions of the mass market.

Well, that's the theory. However there's a danger that all the talk by early-adopting cheerleaders about buzz, engagement, influence, etc., simply ends up replacing one set of means-focused metrics with another. Proving cause and effect is challenging at the best of times, and few who are fully immersed in the social media arena have the experience, rigour or resources to do so.

Just look at buzz monitoring practitioners who place great stock in sentiment analysis, but have none of the usual checks and balances (such as standard deviation) that underpin data validity within traditional research. If you can't calculate any margin of error, let alone show that you're listening to a representative sample of a target market, then how can you really prove that your analysis is sorting the wheat from the chaff and contributing valuable actionable data to your client's business? It's the kind of schoolboy error that makes me shake my head in despair, but it doesn't stop brand managers squandering their discretionary spend on the monitoring and 'measurement' of online conversations, and hanging on every word of what they perceive to be sage-like advice, despite all the obvious problems relating to the provenance and context of online conversations. The only excuse for this is that it's still early days for this kind of metric and vacuums always exist at frontiers.

Perhaps part of the remedy, as far as providing advertisers with a set of more tangible metrics is concerned, is collaboration between practitioners at the forefront of social media and research organisations that are experienced at distinguishing between noise and insight. This seemingly straightforward solution is not without its problems: buzz monitoring outfits make their profits from their analysis regardless of its quality, so they have no incentive to change their current model -- unless advertisers get savvy. You only have to look at the raging debate surrounding the Net Promoter Score metric to see that major research organisations don't all sing from the same methodological song sheet.

Maybe then it's time to go right back to basics and reevaluate the role and definition of marketing, as the Chartered Institute of Marketing did last year. The point being that it makes more sense for the metrics debate to start with key client stakeholders determining what they are trying to achieve business-wise with their marketing, and why, as opposed to pondering which marketing technique to use, when, where and for how much. Otherwise advertisers shouldn't be surprised if they end up buying snake oil from some self-interested practitioner offering another set of smoke and mirrors that not surprisingly justifies the budget being allocated to the great idea or production capability in question.

Hopefully, a more collaborative approach with all key stakeholders will avoid the inevitable balkanisation of metrics, which will in the longer term further marginalise the marketing industry from the businesses it is supposed to serve.

Justin Kirby is managing director, digital marketing communications.