The future lies with those most comfortable with ambiguity.

The things we can measure most easily, are often a waste of time.

We speed through things to do lists because we love to cross things off, but how often do we focus on the less measurable things, goals or dreams. 

The best thing that ever happen to business has been the arrival of data and near instant, seemingly perfect accountability, but what if it’s also been the worst thing?

What if the more data we had, the more we realized we didn't know, let alone understand. 

For all of us who grew up on advertising before "digital", knowing that results were vague, that success happened over several years and that brand metrics would survive a mistake wasn’t that comforting. But it did allow us to focus on our gut and find ways to connect with people using creativity and empathy.

We knew that everything was complex,  that attribution was impossible, we were totally comfortable with what we didn't know, because we didn't know much.

We instinctively understood that big purchases were ALWAYS the results of billions of moments in someones life.

We knew that perfect targeting was both impossible but also imperfect, it's "wastage" from a 1991 BMW TV campaign I saw as a 12 year old boy, that in a minute way leads me to own a BMW 650i right now.

It's clear that better measurement, faster results, a focus on attribution is a step in the right direction. But I worry we've swung from being entirely heart to entirely Head, and based on incredibly dubious mathmatics that an industry so impressed by data, isn't applying critical thought to. 

A failure to understand Cause and effect.
For one, the professional of Advertising seems to be entirely unaware that correlation doesn't equal correlation. If as a lover of Diet Coke, I'm bored enough one day to "like" Diet Coke on Facebook, dumb ad studies are going to show that I drink WAY more Diet Coke than an average person and conclude it was the act of liking the page that made me drink more. Not that I liked the page because I do.

If, as I technology obsessed, design loving, bit showoffy guy, as part of my normal media diet I see a Lexus Mohile ad on Wired the day I walk into a Lexus Dealership, some "data genius" is going to think I spent $60,000 because of their ad, rather than think it ratified their targeting approach. 

Do we measure what matters?

In theory we should all love the objective new world of digital, a chance to see what works, to optimize, to see the difference we all make, but what if the relentless chasing of results and measurability can make us more likely to fail.

I have an unusual very personal belief that the devastating uncomfortable truth of advertising is that we have little idea what real-life metrics are shifted by what we do. We can of course see correlations, we know what's working better, and worse, but to assign attribution to any single thing accurately is doomed.

There are simply far too many variables that we can’t control. Quality of product, PR, online reviews being just some of the big ones. While working at GlaxoSmithKline for some years, the sales teams took massive pride in boosting YOY Value sales by 8% of Lucozade and Ribena due to increasing distribution, another team felt it was entirely due to a successful price rise, the brand teams thought it was their new ad campaign, deep down it was probably that it was the hottest summer on record. 

Metrics are easy to shift, government workers have long had performance measures to pick up the phone fast, but it only counts if they pick up. So a slightly busy times phones just go unanswered and performance indicators show rapid improvements. 

Time to embrace the soft.

As a society we’ve fallen in love with the instant gratification and objectively of digital metrics, it’s a world of clicks, views, “likes,” visits, and such. This is where part one of the McNamara fallacy kicks in.

1) Affect the statistics we measure

We may set out with a brief to build awareness, but when all we can measure are views or “likes,” that’s what we seek to accomplish. We unknowingly move from a broad strategy into tight tactics, tactics that may accomplish your goals, but little else.

The metrics of measurement suggest that the toilet cleaner driving “likes” by publishing cat or baby pictures is doing well, yet common sense would show this to accomplish little.

The Internet is now awash with beer brands showing they drive conversation by asking people how their week is going, by brands offering prizes for a retweet, it’s a mindless, vapid world of selfie competitions and provocation.  The lofty goal degenerated into proxies for demonstrating success that at best are meaningless but at worst are damaging.

2) Fake’ vertising

With such simple and deliverable metrics, there is an urge to focus so tightly on them that we lose all focus altogether. When the measure of success becomes views or likes, we see a new market, a market to fudge results.

Companies that used to work with influencers to ensure that viral videos are published by the connected trendsetting people that matter have now been swamped by a much cheaper option, companies that guarantee views.

Some agencies  buy 1m views on YouTube for $400, or 100,000 Facebook likes or 70,000 twitter followers, “success” has never been cheaper.

We're in a time where painful sampling ventures that didn't work, are now glossed over with made up metrics or vague quotes like "best ever" and a case study video cropped tightly to show crowds and overlaid with uplifting U2 music.  Maybe the event should have been a learning experience not a case study to pitch to do more of the same next year.

3) Convenient assumptions

The metrics we count have no meaning; we’ve no idea what a like is worth, how many people a retweet reaches, or what the value of that would be. We spend time and energy obsessing over precise data that has no understood value. Some studies show the value of like be as much as $214.81; others suggest it’s as little as $0. We get confused between the cause and the effect.

Starbucks opened a tweet a coffee campaign, which produced $180,000 of sales. But we’ve no idea if these were incremental sales or just a way to rechannel existing sales through a overly complex, less profitable payment system.

4) Don’t care about things that do matter.

It’s part Two of the McNamara fallacy that really hurts, not only do you do what you can to boost what you can measure, but you fail to do anything that produces results you can’t measure.

We live in a world where the biggest changes come from the things that are hardest to measure, it’s the word-of-mouth recommendation after the good experience. It’s the smile at the checkout. It’s the TV ad that made you cry. It’s the Yelp review. I’s the new look to the store, the rebrand, the good press on TV, the new CSR program.

Buying things takes a billion things to come together and align. Many of the most important things don’t happen online, they can’t be seen and they should never be forgotten.

Getting comfortable with ambiguity.

It’s a horrible conclusion, it sits funny and it looks terrible in a deck. But the goal for most organizations should be to use data to track progress , but to use the heart to  set the course. 

Rather like education, tests are not there to teach, they are there to monitor just some, not always important, metrics that can designate progress or issues.

Our world is changing, as advertising agency people we need to make and do things we've never made before. We're going to be negotiating over rights for VR, or doing weird revenue shares, or making stuff with 5 different creative partners at the same time. We've got new things like Native, VR, Wearables, DCO, we've got things we in all honesty can't be experts in because they've not existed before.

It means new measurements, new production processes, it means filling in a ROI calculator for something we've absolutely no idea what will happen as a result of.

As a culture we're going to have to get better at dealing with things that involve risk and learning, and to be able to understand in our hearts what works and what doesn't. 

Don't freak out,  as William Bruce Cameron said: “Not everything that counts can be counted.”