Yahoo Justifies Greystripe Collabo with Financially-Bereft Stats

So Yahoo got all chummy with Greystripe, an ad-supported mobile game and apps purveyor. For two months they worked together to promote Yahoo oneSearch, a universal search tool for mobile.

The campaign was called "Be a better..." (handyman, explorer, etc) and you can check out some executions here.

To demonstrate how smart (or how adept at denial) Yahoo is, the results of the campaign have come in.

These-there are them:

o oneSearch ads doubled brand awareness to 75 percent in a test group, versus 33 percent in the control group.
o Greystripe increased consumer interest to try Yahoo! oneSearch in the test panel, with 18% saying they "definitely will try."
o Ad-supported games generate a "new metric" called BRAND LIFT. The logic, verbatim: "Since the ad is completely full screen and not a banner on a small screen, the ad gets more visibility and thus BRAND LIFT is a new metric for judging the success of these campaigns."

Well. Every good set of statistics need a "WTF?" bullshit bullet, doesn't it? It's too bad BLACK HOLE isn't an anagram for BRAND LIFT, because the two phrases probably have a lot in common.

Some stats we're actually interested in: How many "definitely will try" respondents "actually did"? And how many of those that "actually did" actually remained users?

Lest anybody forget, the true test of a campaign's effectiveness lies in the payoff. So if you're going to send stats out and uncork your champagne bottles, make sure the stats actually say something.