Week 5- Always On: Chapter 4: "Metrics: Moving from Impressions to Impact," pp. 107-139.

This chapter of Always On addressed the very important issues of finding better ways to determine the effectiveness of advertising and marketing across all platforms, both digital and traditional.  It gave a great overview of the classic metrics used, the new emerging metrics, and the issue of meshing all these different statistics into easy to use formats that actually help marketers decide the best marketing mix for their products.  It also highlighted the trend in metrics that tell not just if the consumer saw the ad, but if it actually influenced the consumer and/or caused them to purchase the product.

I think these new metrics based on consumer action, rather than consumer viewing will greatly help companies in the tough, competitive environments they find themselves in.  Companies are being forced to make better financial and investing decisions in everything they do.  The more information they have about the effectiveness of their actions, in actually help them drive profits and growths, the better they will become.

Another example the demonstrates the need of these more effective measures is the Pet.com Pet Sock Puppet.  The Pet.com Pet Sock Puppet and other marketing campaigns become well-known, well like advertisements that impressed consumers and marketers alike (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pets.com).  The Pet Sock Puppet even gained a huge fan base and was featured on many talk shows, but the company when bankrupt within 2 years of starting.  Perhaps if the company had better metrics to realize that is $11.8 million advertising, was not contributing to actual sales, it would have had a better chance of success.  According to the old metrics, the advertising campaign was a huge success, because it had large viewing and awareness rates.  But I am sure a deeper dive using today's standards would have shown it was not leading to actual sales and consumer engagement.  Hopefully with the emerging metric systems being used today, future companies will be able to avoid the fate of Pet.com and its infamous Pet Sock.