Does Wall Street Get It? Accountable Ads Becoming more Important

Today's Wall Street Journal featured an article titled "Call to Action Ads Give Clients Results They Can Measure." It's the first time I have seen the Journal embrace something we have known would happen... that the trackability of online marketing has begun to filter into the world of Madison Ave. advertising.

By incorporating website addresses in a television spot, marketers can quickly guage an ad spot's effectiveness. Companies like Cadillac are running ads and immediately correlating the numbers over to visits on the landing pages created for the TV campaign (see www.cadillacunder5.com for an example.) According to the Journal, Papa John's is able to track online orders by the hour and can immediately judge a spots effectivess.

The part of the article I found the most compelling was this quote from John Freeland, managing partner at Accenture: "Do they focus on marketing as a management science, or do they treat it as an art form?" And of course the fact that all this stuff is measureable also means that it can be tested and optimized. I wonder if they are doing that too. They certainly should be.