When will folks learn that their endless reporting of “media impact value” is complete horse-pucky. It’s just a made up number, faker than the Gucci bags at LuxuryTasktic.com. I can’t buy a mansion on the beach with the $154 million that “data research company” Launchmetrics reported for Fashion Week. In fact, nobody can buy anything with it.
People and brands (and “data research” companies) drape themselves in these overblown figures because they make eye-catching headlines, they inflate a brand’s importance, and they emphasize the incredible lengths that each brand goes to get all that social media. But it’s just a made up number.
And what proves that media impact value is all eyewash is that nobody ever makes any effort to ground it in proper marketing costs or other measures. Do they ever deduct the costs involved in getting the media? Of course not. If they actually used real dollar numbers to calculate the cost-per-dress-sold, their results might not seem as rosy. Even cost-per-target-audience-member-reached would be a far more meaningful number than what is reported here.
Since this issue of The Measurement Advisor is about socially responsible organizations, we’ve got to ask the question: “What would the value be if they took all those costs and all that media and did something meaningful to save the planet or promote social justice?”
Netflix streams in as Menace runner-up
As long as we’re pointing fingers at bad metrics, Netflix deserves its own special Menace award for changing their definition of “viewing” a program. According to TV Revolution, Netflix now counts just two minutes of watching a program as a “view.” That’s versus the previous standard, which required the viewer to have watched at least 70% of a program.
That two minute definition is certainly not based on any reality that I know of, and definitely seems designed to inflate viewership stats rather than measure actual viewership. I watch two minutes of lots of things and have no idea what they even are. The opening credits might last for two minutes. In fact, it takes longer than two minutes to decide if a program is even worth watching or not. ∞
Thanks for the image to PublicDomainPictures on Pixabay.
