It won’t happen this year, and it won’t happen next year — but brand measurement is coming. Attempting to track brand impact the way we track ad clicks would currently be prohibitively expensive, but that’s temporary. Distributed media reporting is improving, and large-scale analytics are getting ever cheaper.

Earlier this week, Yahoo!’s RightMedia and other ad exchanges were portrayed as undervaluing high-value publisher inventory at the annual IAB confab that I should probably have attended this week. Saul Hansell provides the best playback I’ve seen of the IAB opening session, and it made me realize the speaker picked the wrong scapegoat in this particular case. In her opening talk incoming IAB chairman Wenda Harris Millard started said, “We must not trade our advertising inventory like pork bellies.”

Saul’s observations on the audience are not too surprising, given the dramatic shifts going on in advertising:

Half the audience felt this was the rallying cry for the battle to save the creative art of advertising from being devoured by soulless math drones.

And the other half saw it as the last gasp from a species ill-suited to survive in the current environment where results can actually be measured.

The “species” will survive just fine, as long as they acclimate to a higher-volume, lower unit-cost world. Offline dollars coming online delay the dynamic but not indefinintely. As in any other market, new technologies create revenue compression. New vendors arise at much lower prices than the incumbents and have infrastructure so very cheap that they can be profitable.

The trading rhetoric apparently arose in the context of advertising exchanges and the fact that they don’t perform as well as in-house media sales. Of course they don’t, but that misses the point. The exchanges are simply an efficient aggregation of a large number of advertising campaigns and targeting data. Performance-based advertising at its most basic level provides the majority of the value shift, and the extra efficiency of the exchanges is secondary.

The entire raison d’etre of online advertising is a slow, continuous shift of risk from the advertisers to the publishers, networks, and now exchanges. Increasing measurability means the pickier, metrics-driven buyers will make their clients more money and have more successful careers. Publishers that have inventory that stand up to measurable goals will also necessarily do better. Neither brand advertising nor ad creative are immune from the trend.

Until six months ago, I thought this meant brand advertising would die within a decade. However, it’s becoming clear that brand advertising has measurable value even if we can’t measure it well today. Google’s creation of the keyword economy was the first step. For many companies, the search keyword that drives the most traffic is their brand itself. Step two is search re-targeting, which is not yet a mature service but coming on strong. What we can’t yet do is measure which brand message(s) caused the keyword search to begin with or what creative was most effective.

But it will happen.