In 1935, Austrian physicist Erwin Schrödinger developed a thought experiment involving a cat, a flask of poison, and a radioactive element in a closed box. Without getting too deep into the quantum physics, Schrödinger posits that as long as the box is closed, we can think of the cat as being simultaneously both alive and dead.
Now apply that thinking to TV advertising. If a campaign delivered 50 GRPs but didn't have a mechanism for measuring ROI, did it simultaneously overperform and underperform? For years, marketers didn't have the tools to provide an answer. Today they do, but despite the...