Oxford professor challenges Ritson’s ‘tsunami of bullshit’ claim but concedes social marketing has ‘vanity metrics’
A marketing professor from Oxford University has challenged some of the views of controversial academic and fellow professor Mark Ritson on digital and social media marketing, but admitted advertisers should approach the channels and their “vanity metrics” with “healthy scepticism”.
Andrew Stephen: “I agree with Mark Ritson in that we need better objectives. Before you think about return on investment, you have to think about return on objective”
Andrew Stephen, the Australian-born head of marketing faculty at Oxford University’s Saïd Business School, said measurement metrics of social channels are “not right”, and urged the industry to reach agreement on viewership standards.
But, he argued social channels have the clear potential to offer more accurate information than traditional media and insisted they are major avenues for reaching consumers.
I wouldn’t call his points challenging, but rather contrarian complementary to few of Mark’s points.
Conclusively both are saying the same – Social Media and Digital aren’t the problems. The laziness and tactical execution at the expense of Strategical are the real problems.
One thing is certain in this game. Absolutely nobody gets it right 100% of the time. Most are not even close. However, I truly applaud Ritson for his gauntlet challenge to the media and marketing fraternity who certainly cannot claim to have all of the answers. Somebody needs to challenge the status quo because unfortunately, c99.9% of advertising practitioners have clients to appease, jobs to protect and families to feed ( so who can blame them).
However, this invariably leads to “safe” decisions, herd mentality and fear of calling out the Emperor in his birthday suit.
Ritson is right to question the industry direction if he believes it is misguided, just as Andrew Stephen is right to question Ritson (and applaud him too). Critics have called Ritson’s claims “dangerous”. I disagree. It is the absence of such probing that is most dangerous.
Anybody taking a dogmatic stance that one media channel is the answer to everything is misguided and unworthy of a senior role in this industry. Yes, our TV habits are changing, yet linear TV viewing remains strong and almost every credible research house supports the view that TV still moves the dial for big brands more than any other medium. Some demos still read print, so to discount the entire channel is careless. Digital is effective for many things and even though the “most measurable medium” is still growing into its skin of accountability 17 years on, it justifiably attracts enormous media spends . OOH reaches almost everybody and is almost certainly under invested by most brands.
We should question more and always be restless for better solutions.
Still looking for that “challenge”…. must be somewhere hidden in the text….
Wait! Is that it? No…. no that’s not it. Still looking…. I
I must be missing something. This reads like he totally agrees wit everything I said. That can’t be it…
Still looking….
This is a key point: “But these technologies and platforms have the potential to be vastly superior and effective from an analytics and measurement standpoint than any of the traditional media channels.”
So what? That is half of Ritson’s argument – that being able to measure something means nothing if the thing you’re measuring is irrelevant. The criticism of digital has been as much that it isn’t effective in what it claimed to be able to do. If given the choice between not being able to measure something that is effective and being able to measure something that isn’t, the former is obviously superior – a point Stephen’s conveniently ignores.
The problem with interviewing academics is that they have often built their career around a specific area via their research focus. In Stephen’s case, he’s hitched his wagon to being an expert in digital/social during its hype over the last 10 years. Now that the edifice is crumbling somewhat – or at least a re-basing of expectations – he is in a difficult corner, with a very strong incentive to be an apologist for all the appalling behaviour occurring.