The WSJ article on Facebook’s sales lift research is a new bow on an old, old package. Using post impressions studies to calculate the lift in sales derived from advertising was being used over 25 years ago.
While I applaud the continued push to connect online ad expenditures to off-line results, articles like this in the WSJ make it seem like digital marketers haven’t been thinking about this for decades. Now that Facebook is now putting money behind methodologies that have been around for well over 30 years, it is being treated as some kind of new concept. Keep on studying, but lets not kid ourselves, this is old school research applied to ‘new’ media (I hesitate to call internet advertising new anymore.)