Stop measuring impressions. Start measuring expressions.

Coca Cola is switching to measuring expressions over impressions.

With increasingly complex outlets it’s getting harder to justify using impressions as a sole analytic. As advertiser’s in the new digital world, we don’t control things anymore. It’s not like the olden days of there being a set number of tv shows, radio stations, and newspapers with ads people basically had to pay attention to. Measuring impressions in that world made sense.

Today, people own brands now, so instead of measuring how many people are hearing what we’ve said, measuring how many people responded to the brand is a much more indicative and robust measurement. With the internet, social media, yelp, youtube, amazon, whathaveyou, people are finding infinite outlets to get their opinions heard, and with digital word of mouth, advertising has a lot less say on what a brand means to someone. Instead of fighting against it, we should use it to our advantage:

1. Create work that people will respond to, optimize work for that over impressions or click-throughs. People will create much more content for you than your brand ever could on it’s own.
2. Learn from expressions. I can’t tell you how much I learn about general consumer sentiment over a brand or tv spot after reading just a couple pages of youtube comments. Spending tens of thousands of dollars in traditional focus groups is pretty old school and pricey when you can learn so much online for free. (Of course there’s a right time and place for that as well.)

Source: blogs.hbr.org