Quality

Anyone publicly judging the quality of another’s marketing will likely do so without a sense of that campaign’s primary goal.

Such a judge also will rarely have access to the metrics that show to what extent the marketer achieved that goal.

It is fine to say whether you like or dislike an ad. To call it successful or horrible, however, likely reflects entirely on one’s taste and not whether the ad did the job it was crafted to do.

In theory, this is the number of unique, living, sentient human beings exposed to any form of advertising or content.

In reality, it is much more complicated.

Reach is often confused with impressions, which is not good, as it is still challenging to find honest and accurate impression reports.

Impressions typically don’t account for unique viewers or users. The same person can view an ad 1,000 times, and that would mean the ad had 1,000 impressions, but the reach would still be 1 – in an accurate report (see also: Frequency).

Marketers and their peers on the buy- and sell-sides will also frequently conflate reach with “potential reach” (in the same way they might conflate impressions with “potential impressions”). If Twitter has 300 million unique users one month, an ad or tweet there will not have a reach of 300 million. Similarly, if President Barack Obama has 100 million Twitter followers (as of this writing, he has more), that does not mean every love-tweet he posts about First Lady Michelle has a reach of 100 million. That also does not mean President Obama reaches one-third of Twitter users.

This probably sounds obvious to you. If you work in the advertising industry, you will soon be in a meeting where you realize none of this is evident to one of the participants. Your relationship with the participant and your desire to continue your tenure at that company will factor into whether you offer a correction. Also, in that meeting will be a tray of half-stale bagels under the wall-mounted monitor. Unless you know that they were from the meeting right before yours, do not eat them.