In the new era of accountability responsibility and state-authorised bonuses everyone is trying to measure everything.

Most of the time, this is a justification of activity, inactivity, existence or jobs. But in the world of advertising, we need to be particularly careful what we measure. As the saying goes, **we know that only half of our advertising is working - we just don't know which half**.

Online marketing has the beauty of being 100% measurable - or so we are led to believe. The use of cookies and pixels enables us to track who has seen our ad and what they did after it. And all this is beautifully packaged as "analytics"  - a lovely word implying science and absolutes.
 
But online analytics don't tell us as much as we think they do. Is it enough to know how many people viewed an ad? What about how people think and feel? How do you measure the whole experience?

**Measurement v money**

With media budgets shrinking across the board, it has become even more important to justify every penny spent. And so it seems strange that marketers are still so attached to one-dimensional metrics when they really need to know as much as they can.

We've taken an overview of advertising measurement - both on- and off-line - in our whitepaper: Finding Out Which Half Of Your Advertising Is Working. Please feel free to download it here - and leave a comment or get in touch if you want to continue the discussion or find out more.

One of the things I really love about my job is that I'm always learning - in particular about my clients, their responsibilities, their worries, their jobs and their businesses.

I especially love meeting new people working in businesses, industries, and markets where I know very little. This is a fantastically privileged position to be in. How many people have this diversity in their day-to-day lives? How many people get to learn so much from such knowledgeable people?

I was thinking recently about this 'process' of getting to know people and their businesses... how, in those first few meetings, it's all about intently listening and asking questions... or at least that's what I thought I was doing.

I've just been looking through two sets of brand guidelines, both for household-name b2b brands. They are nice, shiny, well produced documents. Look great in print. But I'm looking for guidance on how we use the brands for online projects we're planning.

What we need to know - and I think should reasonably expect of proper, complete, fully-rounded brand guidelines - is how the brands should live in the online environment.

And nope, there's nothing there. It's completely absent. It doesn't appear seem to have been considered at all. They aren't even that old - the last one was produced in 2008.

So I've come to the conclusion that most of what these 'guidelines' contain is a now total irrelevance to the way a brand needs to be used now.

It's thought-provoking. It's insensitive. It's powerful. It's shocking. And that it has created a tidal wave of protest is an irony that's not lost on us.

If you haven't seen the WWF (wildlife, not wrestling) ad that was created by DDB Brazil, see it below (quickly, before they take the link down).

For the record, everyone responsible has been quick to apologise for it. But whilst we can see that many people are understandably sensitive about the 9/11 reference, we can't help wondering if an issue as big as environmental responsibility doesn't deserve a big, hard-hitting bit of publicity...

And of course, a good piece of creative is one that's gets people talking, isn't it?

What do you think?

Yes - your B2B brand can be stronger, fitter and altogether more gorgeous. And it takes just a few minutes. Allow me to explain and invite you all to join in an experiment.

A few weeks ago I wrote a blog post that postulated the three fundamental questions that a B2B company needed to answer if it was to succeed in social media.

I chatted to a few people about this afterwards and we thought that distilling complex issues down to a few basic questions was incredibly liberating. Forget the detail, just look at the topline. So why not apply the same principle to the issue of assessing your brand strength?

I believe there are just ten questions you need to ask in order to get a top-level idea of how strong your brand is (or your client's brand). Naturally, I'm ignoring the details here - but then that's where the devil is - so this is not the basis for a five-year branding strategy. But just ten questions should give you a revealing snapshot of your brand fitness, and highlight the areas you need to work on - thus giving you an opportunity to make your brand stronger.

But what are the ten key questions? And how can you do this in 3 minutes?