IAB urges brands to 'ditch the clickheads' in new spot

The IAB UK, is attempting to move on from a ruling which deems its adtech framework as breaching GDPR, by showing the love through another way, launching a Valentine’s Day-themed campaign urging advertisers to ditch click-through rates for alternative metrics.

Devised with agency Feed, the industry body has released a 60-second film called “Ditch the clickheads”, which is based on a dating app. The film shows a hand scrolling past numerous “clickheads”, accompanied by captions that read “I’ll tell you what you want to hear” and “Appearance is everything to me”.

The hand moves onto other potential “dates”, such as “brand studies”, “econometrics”, “attribution” and “controlled experiments”, which are accompanied by more flattering descriptions.

The metrics included in the new ad and toolkit include brand studies, which collect metrics through surveys conducted across the life of a campaign, measuring awareness, familiarity and favourability.

It also flags up econometrics/marketing mix modelling, showing a set of statistical tools that predicts how all advertising activity translates into incremental sales, as in, sales directly attributed to marketing activity.

These are supplemented by attribution modelling, that evaluates how different media interactions contribute to a sale or action; and controlled experiments, which split a group of people into a test group and a control group to observe and react to a change in media over a defined period of time. The test group is exposed to the change, the control group is not.

The IAB’s initial “Don’t be a clickhead” campaign started in 2019 to encourage advertisers to move away from click-through rates as a form of digital ad measurement.

IAB UK chief executive Jon Mew said: “Four years on from our first National Anti-Click-Through Rate Day, our campaign against clicks is still needed.

“Our research shows that click-through rates continue to be advertisers and agencies’ most valued metric when it comes to direct response campaigns, giving a one-sided and fragmented snapshot of how a campaign is performing.”