more meaningless new account values

I am not the only one!

After complaining in my post about Cutwater’s snagging of the LensCrafters account (an account win that clearly had all to do with their work on and relationship with sister brand Ray-Ban) that the values assigned to new account wins are completely ridiculous, George Parker does the same thing.

The impetus for his wailing against the totally meaningless value put to new account wins is Traffic’s bagging of the Mitsubishi Motors account. He says:

I would love it if someone would actually spell out what that $185 million actually means. Yeah, we know it’s not income, or revenues, or even media spend in today’s totally fucked up messaging environment… So please, can someone come up with a “Metric,” and I hate the word with a passion, that spells out exactly what a new piece of business is worth?

Too right. And if you’re one of the trade mags, why aren’t you on top of this? It is, last I checked, sort of your job to get to the bottom of these stories, not just to spout back the numbers that agency flacks (eager to make the biggest possible splash) announce.

Especially when we all know that those numbers mean nothing.