More about the metric Brigadoon

I have zero time to follow up on it now, but this post by Mark Federman makes a key point. Read and extrapolate:

Why is Online Advertising So Effective?

Because it can be measured. Because the person paying for the ads can be presented with numbers that look big - doesn't quite matter what the numbers are, mind you, just that they're numbers. And they're big.

But certainly, for promoting brand awareness, for increasing offline sales, for "converting" clicks to credit card charges (unless you're in the identity theft business, which is a whole other story), online advertising is not very effective at all . . . .