{"id":18849,"date":"2026-08-04T15:40:31","date_gmt":"2026-08-04T19:40:31","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/advertisingweek.com\/aw360\/?p=18849"},"modified":"2026-08-04T15:40:32","modified_gmt":"2026-08-04T19:40:32","slug":"the-problem-isnt-needing-more-data-but-knowing-what-the-data-is-for","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/advertisingweek.com\/aw360\/news\/the-problem-isnt-needing-more-data-but-knowing-what-the-data-is-for\/18849\/","title":{"rendered":"The Problem Isn\u2019t Needing More Data, but Knowing What the Data Is For"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

Are you measuring more than ever, but feeling less certain about what the numbers actually prove? This article addresses the measurement problem directly: why the metrics most brands rely on are not strong enough to prove the value social creates – and what connecting social and financial data makes possible. It is the fifth in a five-part series exploring the findings of the Brand Currency Index\u2122 – a proprietary <\/em>study by Social Element <\/em><\/a>measuring the value of brands on social media.<\/em><\/h4>\n\n\n\n

Marketers have never measured more, and rarely felt less certain about what the numbers prove. Reach. Views. Clicks. Engagement. Comments. Shares. Follower growth. Posting volume. Sentiment. Response time. Earned conversation. Paid performance.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The dashboard is full of numbers, but because it is disconnected from the real financial metrics of a business, confidence is thinner.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

That is the measurement problem facing brands now, especially in the digital world where every movement spits out a metric. Can digital and social activity be measured?<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Of course it can. But the measures marketers have tried to rely on are not strong enough to explain the value social creates.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

A click is not a business outcome. An engagement rate is not a brand effect. A view does not prove memory. A spike in conversation may mean excitement, irritation, humour, controversy or very little at all. Raw reach can be bought without leaving much behind.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

This limits the usefulness of \u201cperformance\u201d metrics, which were built to describe activity in a channel and which too often have been asked to prove the value of a brand.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

That is too much weight for them to carry, and makes the term \u201cperformance\u201d seem very misplaced.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Brand Currency gives the data a better job.<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Brand Currency changes how we look at that problem because it changes what we ask the data to do. Instead of treating social and digital metrics as weak substitutes for commercial proof, it treats them as evidence of something more useful: the currency a brand carries inside the communities where people interact, influence, recommend, share, mock, copy, ignore and belong.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

That is a different job. It does not pretend that every click can be tied neatly to revenue nor does it reduce brand building to a platform report.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

It starts from the reality that social data is rarely the place where final value appears. It is one of the places where the movement towards value can be observed.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\"\"
The Brand Currency Methodology
Brand Currency Index\u2122 2026<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n

Value is still the point. It always will be. Businesses – and marketers – need to care about revenue, growth, profit, preference, resilience and demand. Those are the outcomes that matter. The mistake has been expecting every social signal to behave like a proof point for those outcomes. Social data is too messy and too contextual for that. Its real strength lies in helping marketers understand how information is flowing between people in social communities, and giving us an insight into the value of that movement.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

That is the role of Brand Currency. It gives marketers a way to look at the data they already have and ask better questions of it.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

What is moving around? What is being exchanged? What gains meaning through those interactions between people? What does the community pick up, repeat or carry forward? Where is the brand earning a role, and where is it simply adding more noise?<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The metrics still matter, but they cannot carry the whole argument.<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

For years, marketers have been asked to justify social by proving its \u201cperformance.\u201d That has pushed the industry towards metrics that are easiest to capture, easiest to compare and easiest to put in a report. Reach, engagement, views and clicks all have their place on \u201cthe dashboard.\u201d They help teams manage channels. They show whether content has been noticed. They can indicate whether a message, format or moment has generated response.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Used in the right way, they are not unhelpful. Used as the whole argument and evidence base for \u201cperformance\u201d they are thin.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

A piece of content can perform well and still tell people very little about the brand. A post can be engaged with for the wrong reasons. A campaign can generate reach without building memory. A spike in comments can be noise rather than meaning. A brand can produce plenty of activity while failing to become more useful, more relevant or \u201cstickier\u201d inside the communities it needs to matter in.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

That is why the old proof model feels exhausted. It forces social metrics to make claims they cannot support. It also undersells what social data can reveal when used properly. The data is not useless. The interpretation is too narrow.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The missing layer is currency.<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Brand Currency gives that interpretation more shape. It sits between channel activity and business outcomes. At one end, marketers can see what happened in the channel. At the other, they can see what happened commercially. The gap between them is where a lot of brand building takes place, and where measurement has often struggled to be useful.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

What Google called \u201cThe Messy Middle\u201d has often proved to be \u201cThe Missing Middle\u201d when it comes to measurement. It is the space where relevance forms, where stuff gets passed around, where communities respond, where people decide whether a brand is worth taking beyond the moment in which they first see it.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

It is the space where social data can become much more valuable, provided we stop asking it to act like a shortcut to the P&L.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The distinction between currency and value is important here. Value is the outcome. Currency is what circulates. Currency moves between people. It is transferable. It is exchanged. It facilitates interaction. It helps us understand flow.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

For brands, currency appears in the signals that show movement inside communities.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Conversation. Participation. Passion. Earned attention. Community growth. Human content. Advocacy. Shared references. The visible traces of people choosing to involve a brand in their lives, their content, their jokes, their recommendations, their identities or their moments.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

These are not replacements for commercial outcomes. They are indicators of how a brand is moving towards them. A brand with strong currency is not merely generating activity. It is earning a place in the systems of interaction where meaning is made and passed on.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Viewed through the lens of \u201ccurrency\u201d rather than \u201cvalue\u201d makes social data more valuable, by giving the data a better role.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Social data is most useful when it reveals behaviour.<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Social media is not society. It does not capture every conversation, every recommendation or every moment of influence, and those it does capture are only one part of how society interacts.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

People still shape each other in kitchens, pubs, offices, shops, stadiums, restaurants, schools, group chats and queues. Communities existed before platforms and will carry on after them.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

But social gives marketers one of the clearest visible records of how people interact. It shows what people talk about, what they copy, what they complain about, what they celebrate, what they ridicule, what they share and what they allow into their own spaces. It shows where brands are welcomed, where they are ignored and where they are carried further than paid media alone could take them.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Seen this way, social data becomes part of the evidence base of community behaviour. It becomes a way to understand the fabric of interaction around a brand. It tells us where attention becomes exchange, where exchange becomes meaning, and where meaning has the potential to contribute to value.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

That is why Brand Currency is more useful than another dashboard of isolated metrics. It does not just count activity. It organises signals into a picture of how a brand performs across the interactions that matter between the audiences that matter for brand and business growth.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The score matters because it improves the choices marketers make.<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Owned signals show how well a brand translates its identity into content and channels. Community signals show how effectively it grows, interacts with and nurtures an audience. Earned signals show whether people are helping move the brand beyond its own spaces.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\"\"
The metrics that shape Brand Currency
Brand Currency Index\u2122 2026<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n

Together, they create a score and a shape. The score gives marketers a comparable view of strength, compared to a category average, and compared to others in the category, including competitors. The shape shows where that strength comes from. It shows whether a brand is overperforming or underperforming against its category. It helps explain whether a brand is building through fandom, narrative, moments or a less distinctive pattern of activity. It also shows where a brand may be busy without building much currency at all.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

That matters because measurement should improve decisions. Too much reporting ends with a number and a round of explanations. Useful measurement creates sharper choices.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Where are we creating movement? Where are we mistaking activity for progress? Which communities matter most? What role are we earning? What kind of currency are we building? Where are competitors stronger? Where is the category giving us permission to stretch?<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Those are not platform questions. They are brand questions.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The real shift is from reporting activity to understanding value through interactions.<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

This is the bigger shift Brand Currency makes possible. It moves social measurement away from defending the channel and towards understanding how communities interact within channels. It recognises that people do not experience brands as reports or content calendars. They experience them through interactions, contexts, occasions, communities and memories. The data that surrounds those interactions can help marketers understand how value begins to form, long before it shows up in a commercial report.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

That changes how we see and interpret so called \u201cperformance\u201d metrics. It puts them in their place; some metrics are useful for managing channels, some are useful for judging content response, some are useful for evaluating business outcomes.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The problem starts when one type of metric is expected to do every job, especially when that job is mistakenly seen as directly driving commercial results.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Brand Currency gives marketers a more useful measurement option because it helps us understand whether social activity is building something beyond activity itself. It tells us whether the brand is gaining movement inside the communities that matter.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Marketers do not need more numbers for the sake of it. They need to know which numbers are worth paying attention to, what those numbers can credibly explain, and what kind of decision they should inform.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

That is why the problem is not more data, but rather recognising what the data is for.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

If the question is whether a post was seen, platform metrics can answer. If the question is whether a campaign delivered commercial return, business metrics need to answer. If the question is whether a brand is building relevance, movement and meaning inside communities, marketers need to measure currency.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

What flows? What travels? What gets exchanged?<\/p>\n\n\n\n

That\u2019s the data behind Social Element\u2019s<\/a> Brand Currency.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Are you measuring more than ever, but feeling less certain about what the numbers actually prove? <\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":7,"featured_media":18748,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"content-type":"","editor_notices":[],"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[3],"topics":[2],"class_list":["post-18849","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-news","tag-brands-marketers","topics-editorial"],"acf":[],"yoast_head":"\nThe Problem Isn\u2019t Needing More Data, but Knowing What the Data Is For | AW360<\/title>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/advertisingweek.com\/aw360\/news\/the-problem-isnt-needing-more-data-but-knowing-what-the-data-is-for\/18849\/\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" 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