Aug 1, 2006 12:00 PM, BY KATHLEEN M. JOYCE

Last autumn, I was invited to participate on a panel discussion hosted by the National Advertising Division (NAD) during Advertising Week events held in New York City. It felt distinctly odd to sit in that ballroom in the W Hotel — a room packed with media advertising buyers and sellers, media researchers and media creative chiefs — as the ostensible representative of the promotional marketing industry perspective. I gave it a shot anyway.

My fellow panelists were Mary Engle of the Federal Trade Commission and Gary Rushkin of consumer watchdog group Commercial Alert. Engle led off with a review of recent rulings by the FTC, most of which were focused on limiting commercial time during children's programming and rules for product placement in television content. Rushkin then decried the woeful inadequacy of those rulings and promised new lawsuits to get such integration tagged as advertising.

After his fireworks, I thought I was presenting pretty tame stuff, focusing on the pressure bearing upon brands to quantify the investment return they get from their spending on branded entertainment in film, TV and personal digital devices. And yet, I got peppered with lots of questions as the panel wound down: What were marketers trying to measure? How were they measuring it? What were they doing with the data once it was developed?

My favorite question of the morning came as I was gathering my notes — and it came from a veteran promotional marketer (it turns out, I wasn't alone in the room with my promotion perspective, after all). Eric Mower, chairman of Eric Mower and Associates, came up and asked me, “They all want to understand the numbers! Do you realize how well-situated our industry is?”

By which he meant, of course, that the folks in the room with a media advertising mindset, those who have relied for years on selling “impressions,” were in something of a panic — because impressions don't cut it anymore with most CMOs and all CFOs. Meanwhile, of course, any promotional marketer worth his or her salt developed at least a rudimentary facility with ROI metrics during the apprentice years of his or her career. When promotional marketers tout their results, they point to sales.

So as the TV upfront goes into a mild Ice Age (see our cover story) and brands build cross-functional accountability review teams (see page 12), expect to see measurement becoming one of the sexiest topics on the agenda. Who'd have thought!

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