Zero Clicks #12: How to measure vibes

Every week in Zero Clicks, we explore the interplay of AI, media, and commerce.

There’s no profession more enamored by bullshit metrics than marketing.

For nearly a decade, we’ve known how much of the internet is fake. Impressions are barely an educated guess, half of all clicks on CPC campaigns are likely bots, and ROAS is in the eye of whatever platform serves as the beholder. According to Attentive or Postscript, nearly every SMS campaign delivers a 20X+ return.

Furthermore, the entire arc of the internet is bending against being able to precisely attribute sales to specific channels. As cookies and other conventional attribution tools fade, many brands are returning to old-school media mix models. No matter how great our need for precision, what we actually have is a lot of bullshit.

The most useful tidbit I got out of my entire college education was this definition of bullshit, courtesy of an anthropology 101 professor: “For any given topic, there’s a gap between what we actually know and what we think we NEED to know. That gap is filled by bullshit.” 

So why do marketers so tightly cling to and report on bullshit metrics that we know are fundamentally flawed? Why do we treat multi-touch attribution dashboards as gospel when we know their limitations?

It’s helpful to think of most marketing metrics the same way that economists think about the unemployment rate. Everyone knows that, taken at face value, the unemployment rate is bullshit. The current unemployment rate in the United States is 4.1%; I doubt you can find a single soul in this nation who believes that only 1 in 25 Americans are actively looking for work but do not have a job. Millions of Americans who the Bureau of Labor Statistics claim have “left the workforce” would prefer to be working. So why do economists watch this collective delusion so closely?

Ultimately, it’s simply the best measurable and directional metric we have. In and of itself, the 4.1% unemployment rate number is meaningless, but it is deeply useful in that basis point shifts are truly microcosmic of employment trends. As much as anything else, the unemployment rate– as it is defined by the BLS– is probably the best tool we have for measuring the vibes of the US economy in monthly real-time.

As marketing leaders, our core job is ultimately to measure flawed metrics and translate them into language that finance leaders can understand. To that end, the most useful bullshit metric for marketers to broadly publicize are not impressions, clicks, or ROAS— it’s whatever the leading indicator is on the aggregate of vibes for your brand. At its core, marketing is the business of creating vibes that can be monetized.

For an omnichannel commerce brand, I’d argue that the most important hero vibes metric is how many people are explicitly searching for your brand on Amazon. This is where the totality of all of your efforts across brand and performance will show up. In a sea of vanity, customers deliberately seeking out your brand on the world’s largest marketplace is something that can’t be faked. The corresponding metric for publishers here is direct traffic. Even in a Zero Clicks world, Google can’t take readers who seek out your publication directly away from you.

In the coming quarters, we’ll see a meaningful shift in how marketers report up the chain. Savvy CMOs will show their finance leads and CEOs two numbers:

1) Post margin marketing efficiency ratio: This is a mouthful but represents a brand’s total sales, net of COGS and shipping costs, divided by total marketing spend across all channels. Ultimately, it measures how successful your marketing is in the aggregate from a pure performance sense, with an eye into how marketing drives profit and not just top line revenue 

2) A single hero metric that conveys “brand vibes”: Find your version of “branded search on Amazon” and track and report on it religiously.

That’s what the CEO needs to know. Everything else is, at best, directionally helpful noise for the marketing team.

Vice President of Marketing, Groombuggy

Groombuggy touts itself as “America’s next generational pet brand” starting in a category I didn’t even know existed– mobile dog grooming. They’re looking for a true marketing leader as they start to hit their growth curve.

While I know nothing about pet grooming, I imagine that in the time it took me to write this sentence, three different Yale business school grads spun up separate search funds to roll up pet groomers. Boring businesses are so hot again.

What stands out to me the most in all this is how many smart entrepreneurs continue to bet on a future where Americans will spend more and more of their disposable income on their pets. They’re all probably right.

Sr. Director, Head of Commercialization, Paypal

Speaking of ecosystem plays, PayPal is hiring a fascinating leadership role to help chart the future for Honey as part of PayPal’s broader ecosystem comprising Venmo and its nascent ads network. All kinds of cool potential here.

Business Development Lead, Wirecutter, The New York Times

There are many interesting things about this role, but it’s the reporting structure that has most of my attention. Per the JD, this rolls up the VP of Partnerships and Portfolio development across the whole New York Times catalog. What kind of broader ambitions does the Grey Lady have for Wirecutter, he wonders?