Measured
: I’ve been at the Aspen Institute for a day and a half sitting with smart people figuring out ways to get ethnic media its due with advertisers. There are some issues in common with online and citizens’ media: trying to navigate advertising agencies as “gatekeepers of risk,” as one of the participants called them, and agencies’ fetish for measurement and performance. Kevin Riley, a marketing exec at IBM, gave advertisers a caution I love:
The less measurable it is, the more valuable it is.
Clark emphasized that he’s not against measurement; who can be in his biz? But the point is that if advertisers and agencies wait for something new — blogs, vlogs, podcasts, RSS, and whatever’s next — to be fully measurable, they’ll miss the opportunity to get in on the buzz of something new while it’s still new and still cheap.
