Messy Menageries

Work in an office environment long enough, and sooner or later you'll encounter a "brand enthusiast hoarder." You'll know them by their workspaces. Venture a step or two inside and you're plunged into a trinket & trash menagerie (apologies to Tennessee Williams).I knew one woman who smothered every available surface with M&M's collectibles. M&M's candy dispensers, mini-trucks, coffee mugs and cookie jars. M&M's dolls, stickers, magnets. M&M's everywhere. Another cluttered her desk, shelves, filing cabinet and chairs with Happy Meal toys and Pillsbury Doughboy Beanie Babies. Forget holding a meeting in there – you had to hack your way in with a machete just to drop off a memo. These folks give you a whole new appreciation for clean floor policies.I'm afraid that my personal experience with these obsessive compulsives may have permanently colored my view of Facebook "Likers." According to Facebook's S-1 statement for its IPO, 845 million active users post 2.7 billion "Likes & comments" every day, but I still can't wrap my head around publicly declaring your love for Velveeta or Orkin Pest Control in front of friends and family. A half-million Swiffer fans can't be wrong, I guess, and perhaps they just do it to grab digital coupons. But it's one of the foundations upon which Facebook's projected post-IPO valuation of $100 billion – making it bigger than McDonald's – will rest upon. Wow.But I can understand why a brand would court the love of neurotic devotees given the apparent imprecision of their outbound digital advertising efforts as revealed in comScore's new Charter Study. Conducted in December 2011 over 12 national brands ranging from Kellogg's, Kraft, General Mills and Kimberly-Clark to Chrysler, Allstate and Sprint, the study found that while online advertising is increasingly measurable, it's still a very messy business.The study was no small effort. More than 3,000 ad placements, 381,000 site domains and 1.7 billion impressions were tracked. Key results, termed "eye-opening" by comScore, included:Only 69% of digital ad impressions were classified as being "in-view." That means that fully 31% of ads weren't seen by anyone. The study's authors speculate that consumers either scroll past ads before the ads could load or don't ever scroll down far enough on a page to find them. The "in-view" percentages varied widely by site, but some sites registered rates as dismally low as 7%.comScore says that 4.8 trillion ad impressions were delivered across the "U.S. web" in 2011, but if you extrapolate these weak "in-view" findings, it means that about 1.5 trillion digital ads virtually went to the digital trash bin.72% of the digital advertising campaigns in the Charter Study had at least some ads running next to content considered objectionable – "not brand safe" – by the advertiser.4% of the digital ad impressions (and in some campaigns, as many as 15%) were delivered outside the brand's desired geographical area – in many cases, in markets where the advertised product wasn't even sold.I don't know if 1.5 trillion unseen ads is a big deal or not. But based on all the fevered talk about "granularity" and "personalization" that's out there nowadays, I had assumed that digital advertising was a lot more, well, granular and personalized than the comScore Charter Study suggests.I do know, however, that 1.5 trillion is a bit more than all the ads posted in 2011 by the number one U.S. publisher of display ads, which is – you guessed it – Facebook. The fact that 85% of Facebook's revenue currently comes from third-party advertising might give some of its IPO enthusiasts pause. So again – wow.Speaking of theory vs. practice, Archrival, a youth marketing agency, claims that college students have a "profound indifference" to QR codes. The agency conducted a survey on 24 college campuses and found that while 81% of students owned a smartphone, and 80% had previously seen a QR code, only 21% could successfully scan a QR code in front of the survey taker.The students struggled with the process: Some didn't know they needed a third-party app; some thought it could be activated via their camera; others just lost interest saying the process took too long. The bottom line is that three out of four of these most important of trendsetters say it's unlikely they'll scan a QR code in the future. One more time – wow.Bill Schober is editorial director of the Path to Purchase Institute. He can be reached via e-mail: bschober@p2pi.org or phone: 847-675-7400 (ext. 132).

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