EDITORIAL: Why advertising is so immeasurable.(Brief Article)

Lord Leverhulme's admission that he never knew which half of his ad budget was poured down the same route as a bottle of Domestos still haunts agencies and their clients.

For agencies, the observation has fuelled the collective insecurity which manifests itself in an almost obsessional mission to convince customers that advertising effectiveness is quantifiable and measurable. For advertisers, it lives on in a fruitless search for perfection - advertising whose effectiveness is totally measurable and, therefore, guaranteed. As Gary Duckworth, the DFGW chairman, points out on page 22, Leverhulme may have led everyone down a blind alley where - in the words of Starcom Motive's Mark Cranmer - advertising is 'overmeasured and undervalued'.

Overmeasured? Almost certainly. Pressures on budgets are leading many advertisers to demand levels of accountability that are impossible to deliver. Claude Hopkins, one of the founding fathers of US advertising, once declared that if there was a foolproof method of pre-testing ads he could make dollars 1 million a day.

However, he was forced to concede that there was no such thing.

This isn't to say advertising shouldn't strive for effectiveness or to dismiss all attempts to measure it is pseudo scientific tosh. ...