• by Joe Mandese  @mp_joemandese, August 18, 2015

For a company whose brands are premised on getting rid of unhealthy things (you know, germs), it’s not surprising that Clorox would be among the first CPGs to get rid of a digital metrics equivalent: the click-through.

While they may not seem that unhealthy to the average digital media maven, Erika Lamoreaux saw the damage they were doing not just to the health of Clorox’s campaigns, but to the way its entire marketing organization thought about their brand health. Not surprisingly, when she joined Clorox as associate director of digital media, she began a campaign to get rid of click-throughs -- almost immediately.

“We don’t report it,” she told Real-Time Daily Editor Tyler Loechner during a keynote conversation at the Programmatic Insider Summit in Lake Tahoe. Lamoreaux was referring to Clorox’s campaign management dashboard, which literally doesn’t include clickthroughs, though she said if analysts work really, really hard, they can still find the data buried somewhere in the database.

Her real point was to try something radical to get people thinking differently about digital campaign success metrics -- and the clickthrough simply wasn’t that.

“0.1% of people clicking on my banner and coming to my website -- I don’t care,” she said, adding, “I really care about the 99.9%” who don’t click-through one of Clorox’s banner ads.

Initially, she implied, the move was very disruptive for Clorox’s marketing team, because “we took away the one metric that they understood and we really didn’t have anything to replace it.”

Over the next two years, working closely with digital agency AKQA, she said Clorox embarked on what she called a “measurement evolution.”

Initially, that led to Clorox benchmarking digital display ad exposures to “brand lift stuff,” but the problem with those, she said, “is they’re not fast.” Generally she said brand lift studies can take “six to eight weeks, if not a full quarter to understand if we’re performing.”

The next stage of Clorox’s measurement evolution was to incorporate “viewability” scores, and the company has been working closely with Moat as its primary measurement platform, leveraging upward of “25 different metrics” to deduce it.

Lamoreaux said Clorox is still embarking on this evolution and she’s not exactly sure where it will evolve to next, but she said she would like to see it develop beyond viewability to higher forms of accountability -- like a consumer actually being exposed and/or influenced by a Clorox brand impression.

She said the company is already beginning to apply that logic to its video campaigns, and it’s beginning to explore how to do it with mobile too.