The 1960s, age of the Beatles and the Stones, was a grand time for advertising. We were on a roll, doubling dollars every six years. Awards dinners opened on every corner, like black-tie Starbucks. Agencies got 15% for sure and more for extra services, while half a dozen hot shops run by 26-year-old creatives competed for Agency of the Year.

Even grumpy advertising research shared the high. Money, logic and controlled experiment seemed capable of explaining everything.

Then something trivial happened.

It was an Advertising Research Foundation report, ‘Toward Better Media Comparisons.’ Even the title was unassuming. Yet, this was to be one of the more important papers ARF would ever publish. And a ticking bomb.

The report told us how to compare the advertising value of different media, but then drew a line between the responsibilities of the medium and those of the advertising it carried.

Media’s job ended, the report explained, when it delivered the ad message. Ad communication, and consumer response were the responsibility of the ad itself and many other things, like the product. The consequences of this split were profound and unintended.

Far from feeling demeaned, media welcomed the news. The research authority had taken them off the hook. Advertising effects were not their table, call another waiter.

So for the next 40 years, media’s sizable research budgets would be spent to measure message delivery, a.k.a. audience, arguably one of the simpler pieces of the advertising puzzle.

Magazines funded total audience measurements, reading days, page exposure, purchase influence, reach and frequency, issue audience accumulation, Brand Rating Index, Simmons, NMS, TGI, MRI, Monroe Mendelsohn, Dataquest.

Television paid for diaries, meters, people meters, 200-market measurements, sweeps, attention levels, viewer volatility, out-of-home viewing, Quads, NTI, NSI, Arbitron and SMART.

A billion research dollars later, we’ve learned a little more about media, but not much about advertising.

For the billions they take each year, media sellers are little help answering the hard questions. They don’t worry much about whether the advertising they carry works or not, and they pay a high price for this lack of concern. The uncertainty of a sales response sends advertising dollars to promotion where results are costly, but predictable. It encourages CPM buying, which is advertisers telling their agencies, ‘if you guys aren’t sure it’s going to work, I want to pay as little as possible.’

No, media are not an island. Producing sales may not be their job, but helping messages sell is certainly in their interest.

But the media are not alone in their reluctance to track sales. Advertising is bought to sell product, but most agencies are uncomfortable with that obligation. When confronted, normally puffed-up advertising suddenly becomes small and quiet. ‘Sales are the wrong measure,’ it explains. ‘Advertising effects are subtle, long-term and hostage to the brand’s own qualities and marketplace conditions.’

Their reluctance is also understandable. The more we focus our measurements on sales, the less they deal directly with media or advertising.

Forty years ago, the problem won. But today we understand that for media, exposure is a half-measure of performance. It ignores media’s contribution to an ad’s relevance, believability, and persuasiveness, key elements in producing an advertising response.

The new ARF model, ‘Making Better Media Decisions,’ published this spring, is more forthcoming. It says:

Direct response advertising, the Internet and interactive TV have expanded media’s job from simply exposing a message to include encouraging and facilitating a response. The concept of recency has focused marketers on advertising’s contribution to making the next sale. And more and more, it is on response that media are being judged.

Which brings us back to the question: ‘How can the media help us make advertising more accountable?’ They have both the interest and some money.

We have tools to measure advertising response. New, widely used statistical techniques like marketing-mix modeling are able to separate out advertising’s contribution to sales and media’s role within that.

Magazines and the Internet have been quick to respond with well-crafted studies of media ROI. But the big Kahuna, television, is notably absent from the search.

All media claim to be partners in marketing. TV claims to be more than just a message carrier, but to make that case it needs to pitch in and help measure its contribution to making the sale.

It’s been a silent partner far too long.

Erwin Ephron is a partner at Ephron, Papazian & Ephron in New York. He can be reached at ephronny@aol.com.