Pulling Digital Out Of A Nosedive

How Tom Deierlein helped the mission to prove digital advertising's real value

“You have to meet this guy.”

It was my boss, Cheryl Benton, who introduced me to Tom Deierlein.  She described him as a highly-motivated and hardworking West Point grad, but I don’t think it was her word choice that got me jazzed.  It was the enthusiasm with which she described him that got my attention.

It was 2000 and digital was going through this odd evolution, prompted by a big question:  What is digital advertising good for?

I describe it as odd because up until that point, lots of people thought they knew the answer to that question.  Led by a certain CPG company with a best-in-class reputation for marketing excellence, a number of advertisers had pigeonholed digital display by labeling it a direct response medium. 

Famously declaring digital ads worthless unless someone clicked on them, that CPG advertiser helped usher in a new era where digital ads were valued based on KPIs best suited for direct response advertising.  That meant an uphill battle for anyone trying to show that digital ads had impact on aided or unaided brand awareness, brand favorability or any other metric of interest to brand advertisers.

Tom Deierlein worked for a company that tried to do exactly that.  Dynamic Logic was among the first companies to show the brand value of digital ads, using a web version of a tried-and-true exposed/control measurement method that was widely accepted in the offline world.

Cheryl and I wanted to use this to show digital’s brand value for our clients.  And so she introduced me to Tom, and I was immediately drawn to him.

Part of it was his drive, but a lot of people who were trying to sell measurement tools to the agency had that quality.  What really struck me about Tom was his willingness to help.  Even before we had committed to supporting Dynamic Logic’s methodology, Tom was introducing our agency to potential clients.  He not only understood that a win for us was a win for him, but he seemed super-committed to the idea.  On more than one occasion, I found myself thinking his drive to help really went the extra mile.

Cheryl had a great relationship with Peggy Conlon, who headed up the Ad Council at the time.  Occasionally, we would do pro bono projects for the Ad Council, and that’s how I found myself in one of the most terrifying meetings of my life.

Tom had helped me, and so I wanted to help him.  A vote of confidence from the Ad Council, famous for its cause marketing PSAs from the likes of Smokey the Bear, would be a huge win.  And so, together with Jeffrey Graham, another early Dynamic Logic employee who I had also worked with at Blue Marble, we got a meeting with the Ad Council’s media research committee to talk about Dynamic Logic’s methodology. 

At the time, I was in my late 20s, with my total years of media experience in the single digits.  I had looked up the names of some of the people I would be meeting with at that Ad Council meeting.  Every single one of them was a media research pioneer.  Most had headed up media research departments with big Madison Avenue agencies, or at large advertisers who spent nine figures on media each year.  Some were outright legends who had developed the tools media people like me used every day to find audiences across media vehicles, or who had developed methods of modeling out ideal media mixes for huge advertisers.

When we walked in the room, it felt like a star chamber.  I remember thinking as I looked at each person sitting at the conference table that it was a fair bet that anyone in that room had been in media research longer than I had been alive.  I got nervous and clammy just thinking about the notion that even though I thought I was good at statistics, I didn’t think any of them would have a problem bringing up a statistics concept or method that I had never even heard of.  It felt like being a high school physics student in a laboratory full of NASA scientists.

And we killed it.

We kept it very simple, discussing how Dynamic Logic recruited people who had seen a digital ad, and a control group of people who hadn’t, and compared the results of brand questionnaires they answered.  We fielded a couple questions about statistical stability, recruitment methods and a couple other things I can’t remember, drew comparisons to offline methods, and got heads nodding across the room.

And it felt so great to walk into a room full of media gods who could have eviscerated me with a thought, but decided not to that day.

Tom Deierlein had helped me, and dammit, I was going to help him.

It’s because enthusiastic and driven people like Tom Deierlein took up that mission – to prove that digital ads had real value for brands – that we don’t think of it as merely a direct marketing tactic today.

Tom, of course, has gone on to do all sorts of other terrific things in his career.  He’s not only championed digital effectiveness measurement, but has also evangelized precise targeting in TV, and has been an advisor to several innovative companies in the digital ad space.  As an U.S. Army Reservist, Tom was called back into service during the second Iraq War.  He put on a uniform again as he was nearing his 40^th birthday and after he hadn’t been in one for over a decade.  The industry had a collective heart attack when we heard news from Iraq that a sniper had shot him, shattering his hip.  Thankfully, he recovered. 

Today, he’s a founder and CEO of an award-winning systems integration company while running one of the digital ad industry’s favorite charities – The TD Foundation.  And tonight, we will raise our glasses in honor of the work he has put into his grassroots efforts to help families and children of wounded warriors and fallen heroes. I can’t wait.