• by Walt Horstman , July 18, 2014

A few weeks ago, I was talking with a colleague from one of the major audience data companies about the future of measuring TV. With all the big data we have at our fingertips, we will soon use the same measurement tools for TV brand campaigns that we use for digital.

We’ll be able to answer such questions as: How much did this TV campaign lift sales? How many leads did the campaign deliver, compared to the last one? Did we increase Web traffic, and by how much?

We know from digital that when a campaign can deliver measurable ROI, budgets will follow. That’s a big part of the story that digital has used to double its revenue over the past five years.

“If you can’t measure it, you can’t manage it,” is one of the undisputed business mantras from Peter Drucker. My colleague was concerned that the current and upcoming generation of marketers and CMOs have been so thoroughly schooled in this belief that they will tend to manage TV brand campaigns only by “the numbers.” One might think, “If it doesn’t drive sales or Web traffic or some other business metric, then the bias will be to shut the campaign down.”

Measurement is then the proverbial sword that cuts both ways for TV branding. Without it, skeptics question the value of TV; with it, we risk transforming all of TV into a form of response sales. But TV does so much more than deliver immediate business results. It builds brands. And to measure brand building, we need a new metric for our big data measurement times:  ROBI: return on branding investment. ROBI needs to measure the increase in the value of a brand from a TV campaign for agencies and marketers. ROBI must be timely, understandable, and quantifiable. ROBI cannot be qualitative or subjective; otherwise, it will not stand up to the scrutiny of today’s big data-driven media world.

Measuring the value of brands is not easy and has been the subject of marketing texts and journals for years. Often it can be very subjective. We always hear of Donald Trump’s disputes with Forbes magazine over his net worth. It’s because of how he values his own brand. In 2011 leading up to the presidential nominations, Donald Trump estimated his personal brand to be worth over $3 billion, a highly subjective figure at best.

Measuring brand value is frequently limited to those brands that have sufficient data.  In 2013, Apple bested Coca-Cola as the most valuable global brand.  Its worth? $98.3 billion, up 28% from 2012. That number is calculated from public financial statements and applies to all of Apple’s aggregated marketing activities, not just its individual TV brand campaigns.

With so much big data at the ready today, it’s time to revisit and expand upon the historic approaches of measuring and managing the value of brands. If we can now accurately forecast when a fashionista will buy herself a new pair of shoes on her favorite website, then we should be able to read the right signals within big data to reliably and quickly calculate a TV campaign’s effect on a brand’s value. In the spirit of Peter Drucker, once we can measure it, then we can manage it. We need ROBI. Otherwise, it will just come down to measurable sales -- and that lone, stark metric in and of itself will become the brand.