Advertising has a reputation for being a "fluffy" business. This humerous video, entitled "The Truth In Ad Sales", sums up the issue:
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One of the reasons I am attracted to new and interactive media is it
presents opportunities to remove some of this “fluff” by bringing more
accountability to advertising campaigns.

Rather then taking a sample of 30 people and asking if they remember
seeing an advertisement on TV the previous day, interactive media
allows you to just load up your analytic software (or CRM solution if
the campaign is offline), and see what kind of performance was
achieved. No more double-talk to clients trying to convince them of an
advertisement’s success - the click thru, page visit frequency and
conversion rate numbers speak for themselves.

There’s still an issue though: regardless of how accurate
interactive analytical tools are, the client needs to accept their
accuracy in order for the tools to be useful. And as it currently
stands, there is definitely a gap in the majority of client’s
understanding of interactive analytical tools.

Agencies should therefore take the initiative to train their clients
in the interpretation of interactive analytics before working on their
campaigns. How can a client be expected to give the same kind of
credibility to an online campaign as a TV spot, when they have been
running TV spots for 20 years and online spots for only 2 months?