Communication Campaigns

How do we measure success?  If there is a math problem, success usually means we found the one right answer.  If we are trying to sell a product, success might be that we make a sale.  But is that all that a successful advertising campaign does – make a single sale?  What about establishing brand recognition, support, or preference for one brand over another, or even willingness to provide personal endorsement of a brand or product?  These are all forms of success for an advertising campaign, but they are far harder to measure than the answer to a math problem.

 

With today’s online advertising options, we have ways to measure tangible behavior – web-page visits, click-through advertisements, mentions in posts, likes and re-tweets.  All of those are digital actions that leave measurable footprints in the vast inter-webs of today’s online experiences.  But are these measures of success?  That depends on what success means to you.  If you are selling advertising, then click-through ads are valuable because more money comes your way.  If you are selling a product, then a click-through ad costs you more money but there is no guarantee that any sale will result from extra cost.  We don’t even really know that the viewer is reading or absorbing any content.  We only know that an item was clicked on.

 

So, while people will promote tangible, measurable behaviors as indicators of success they require us to interpret them as being measures of success.  They are merely individual behaviors that may or may not lead to increased revenue, brand recognition or other desired results.

 

How can we better determine if a campaign is successful?  There are some tried and true methods that require more individual effort.  Focus groups and interviews provide the opportunity for a skilled communicator to read between the lines and to dig at more vague, less obvious elements of a campaign, such as emotional responses, gut instincts, personal desires and the individual differences across the human experience that make some people want to buy something while others will actively resist.

 

My father told me about a research project that he was involved in many years ago.  It used a self-concept measuring tool that required students to respond “yes” or “no” to 80 different questions.  The self-concept scale was administered to more than 900 Deaf students in various programs across the United States.  Overwhelmingly these Deaf students responded positively to the statement “I am good in music.”  Remember that this was self-reporting.  That also means that the student is determining what the question is really asking.

 

You might think that the item is asking whether the student has good musical ability, such as “I sing well” or “I have good drumming skills” but the statement simply said, “I am good in music.”  Let’s suggest that students, at one time or another, had a music experience, whether it was a dance and rhythm experience, a drumming experience, sitting in an auditorium during a concert or even a weekly music class.  From that viewpoint, perhaps “I am good in music” really means “I am well behaved in music class” or “I have not been punished for acting out during the music experience that I had no ability to hear or participate in.”  Who knows what that simple sentence meant to the 900 plus students who read it and responded with “yes”?  If the questionnaire had been administered by a researcher in more of an interview approach, then it would have been possible to ask the students to restate the item so that we knew what the “yes” or “no” was really meaning.  Of course, it was far cheaper to send the questionnaire to about 35 different coordinators, who then distributed them to the teachers of each Deaf student in each school district or Residential School.  So, we are left with the fact that most Deaf kids think that they are good in music, but we don’t know what that meant to the students – good behavior, good skill, or some other kind of inherent “goodness” that they shared.

 

Facts are facts, but we are the ones who determine their meaning, their value.  Tangible measurements of responses to advertisements can be measured but their meaning and value regarding success of the campaign are always open to interpretation.  An interview or focus group could still fail to determine the true value of an advertising campaign but at least there is the opportunity to discover more than just data.

 

Beyond the data obtained by website visits and click-through ads is “listening software” which tracks down mentions of products or organizations within posts and discussions on the internet.  Technically they are not an invasion of privacy, but the concept entirely feels like a breach of trust.  The government might not be using these programs (or might they be using them after all?) so the fourth amendment right to privacy might remain intact, technically, because the use of a platform to post your thoughts and share ideas is not your private space, but rather a public platform that merely appears to be private.  The point is that because it feels private, in the mind of the user, it should be private and there should be no opportunity for data collection without explicit permission.  Using interviews and focus groups makes the consent up front and obvious.

 

Ultimately, a good strategic communicator for a campaign needs to verify that there is value in the campaign.  Using more than one way to measure things is always going to be the better approach.  It is important to remember that merely identifying a means of measurement is not a guarantee that the measurement means what you hope it means.  Interpretation is always at play and a plan to interpret the data needs to be confirmed with evidence from the consumers.  A good spectrum of data collection would have at its very least, digital tangibles such as website visits, ad-based click-throughs, search results, page likes, and retweets plus a careful documentation of sales and ultimately focus groups and interviews.

 

Here's wishing you success.