The data speaks. In 2013, according to McKinsey, global spending on digital advertising was $125 Billion. TV, print and other forms totaled $365 Billion. While digital continues to grow at double digit rates, the old forms refuse to shrink. Why?

The main reason is that digital marketing resists producing efficient, measurable results. Digital is great at creating awareness and driving promotion. It fails utterly at telling a convincing story of why you should buy something.

Using the marketing dictum of my friend Larry Poole, digital methods can’t deliver on marketing’s most important function: Communicating the value of the brand!

DigitalImpact

Which brings me to this interesting interview in today’s WSJ (behind pay wall). The head of media buying group Starcom MediaVest, Laura Desmond, makes the point:

WSJ: TV remains king of the ad dollars. Why isn’t more of that money shifting to online video?

Ms. Desmond: There are issues with measurement, audience data and attribution modeling. That’s why we’re working with a number of partners that are helping us piece together the data and the measurement equation. If you don’t do that and you are making decisions based on market mixed modeling or you’re making decisions based on what has worked in [the] past, you’re not going to be as aggressive to try new things.

Part of the market is lagging, mostly because they’re holding on to the measurement that they know.

WSJ: When will things really change?

Ms. Desmond: We have to unify all these pieces—search, social, online video, mobile, TV, and other things—to understand what drives actual purchase. When that starts to happen, you’ll start to see seismic dollars shift into video and into digital. Many more points of contact go in to actual purchasing of a product than just “I watched it” or “I saw it in a newspaper and I’m going to buy it.”