YOU don’t need me to tell you that advertising has become more fragmented, and more expensive. But may I throw another spanner in the works by suggesting that it is becoming less effective?What exactly do we mean by ‘advertising effectiveness’? Do we want to know how many people were exposed to our ad, were able to recall the ad, liked the ad, engaged with the ad or went straight out and bought the product and then recommended it to all their friends by buying a biplane and writing about its fantastic qualities in the sky above Madison Avenue?Advertisers are starting to turn against the established norms of audience size and exposure as their primary measure of value. Although I fear traditional media planning will continue to depend on basic reach and frequency measures for some time yet, it is fast losing relevancy.Whilst researchers continue to actively seek the solution to ad effectiveness measures, the basic metric of audience size plays right into the quantitative court of suppliers such as Nielsen and TNS whilst eliminating the thorny issues of return on investment and effectiveness. The majority of adverting measurement today is still based on approaches that were developed 30 years ago!