This post by Yujin Sohn, our Sr. Dir. of Marketing.

Last week Media Week ran an article about a study recently released by the Online Publishers Association (OPA) and comScore. Dubbed as “The Silent Click – Building Brands Online”, the report was aimed to make a case for the value of display ads amid the prevailing negative perception of them in the market. (Display ads are intrusive, out of the context, ineffective and so on.)

The report claims that even though the display ads rarely entice direct responses from users, the exposure still has impact on how consumers perceive the brands. For example, one might have not clicked on a branded banner, but later searches the brand or visits the website directly. The report continues that since the display ads’ value is oftentimes indirect, direct responses such as click throughs are not the most accurate metrics to measure the value of display ads.

But I am not writing to advocate or critique display ads. What most intrigues me is the idea of measuring those “silent” actions of consumers and factoring them into ROI.  This has been a well documented challenge over the past 50 years.

The digital technology revolutionized marketers’ ability to collect and analyze data. We now religiously tag, track and collect data from every thinkable consumer touch points.  However, the essence of the problem didn’t go away. We still don’t know the real life time returns of our advertising spends. Furthermore, being obsessed with the data, marketers have grown impatient with efforts whose fruits may take a long time to harvest, and too readily dismiss marketing programs of which returns may not be immediately quantifiable.

Building brands is moving people’s mind. It requires not only science, but also art. In our digital era when everything needs to be measured to make sense, how can we cope with the challenge of measuring the “art” of building brand? Whether technology will help or hinder us in that quest, is an interesting questions to think about.