Happy New Year and welcome to 2018’s first issue of The Measurement Advisor. In a moment we’ll get to my predictions—always one of our most popular articles—and the other great coverage in this issue. But first…
What won’t happen
Let’s adopt a bad-news-first perspective and look at a few things that would sure be nice, but are definitely not going to happen this time around the sun:
- The amount of chaos and breaking news will not decline. Between the Olympics, the World Cup, the U.S. elections, Brexit, and climate change, there will be ever-more attention-demanding developments. Get used to it.
- Blockchain and AI will not be able to predict the future or solve all your problems, no matter how hard you try to wrap your heads around them.
- Social and digital media will not go away, as much as we might want them to.
- Russian hacking will not stop. Look for bots and malignant forces to exacerbate every crisis or controversy that arises. Don’t think it will just be around elections. And don’t think it’s just the Russians, either. There are plenty of others out there who use the same tactics. Their goal is to spread divisiveness everywhere.
- We will not eradicate AVEs. Probably not Ebola or polio, either. (But see below for some promising signs.)
And now the good news
There are a lot more very promising things that will happen—especially in measurement. Including:
- Increased focus on (and education around) business metrics;
- Integration of paid and earned media into single measurement dashboards; and
- A greater emphasis on quality of analysis—not just meaningless metrics that no one understands.
All of these are encouraging signs (despite what I said above) that 2018 might just be the year that we turn our backs on AVEs and other bogus metrics. Driving this are associations and agencies that have jumped into the fight to educate the profession on how to use the Barcelona Principles and approach evaluation from a business perspective. It’s always nice to have more allies in our never-ending battle against bad metrics. ?
