by: Alain Thys
In the 20 years I've been in business, keeping score has been simple. When I hit double-digit growth and profit numbers for Mexx or Reebok ... times were good. When my dot-com incubator imploded ... times were bad. Yet for the years I've had "marketer" on my business card, I've never been able to figure out whether the near € 100 million I've helped burn, really made a difference. And that bothers me.
Yet when I look around me, not that many people seem that bothered. That is why I put together this presentation in which I attempt to demonstrate that marketing needs to become more accountable if it is to have a future (and more importantly, how this can be done).
It goes hand in hand with a number of other projects in the area of marketing accountability we're involved in, like this workshop at MCE, a marketing accountability report due in November and a Marketing Accountability Experimentation Lab, about which you'll be hearing more soon. Oh yes, I'm delivering it for the first time today at Ogilvy's ROI day, so wish me luck :-)
Hi Vincent,
As such I couldnt agree more with that quote. With ROI now being a big buzzword, I see many organisations swinging too far in the other direction, and applying wrong KPI's and short term ROI gains as their measurement tools.
One of the key points of the presentation is that there is a need for a holistic approach to accountability, including long term effects. It is therefore essential to also quantify the long term impact of campaigns.
As far as the IPA/Warc book is concerned, I have that on my desk for thorough evaluation, and hopefully will find the time to write a post about it. Let's just say that many of the findings of the report are counterintuitive and controversial. My gutreaction is that there is a methodological flaw and/or bias here. I.e. by using a database of only effectiveness-award winning campaigns I get different data then researching a fully representative sample.
In other words, by looking at 500 cured patients to prove the effectiveness of a medicin, my results might be a bit off if I thereby exclude 5000 patients the medicin killed :)
Great presentation Alain. It makes me think about the book "Marketing in the New Era of Accountability" that uses IPA dataBANK.
You might want to have a look at these articles.
http://store.warc.com/PDF/FOCUSBinetandField.pdf
http://www.ipa.co.uk/news/news_archive/displayitem.cfm?itemid=2082
If I think that marketing needs to become more accountable, what do you think about "The trouble with applying “accountability” to marketing is that the evaluation is widely flawed, the targets are usually the wrong ones and the result too often leads to the destruction of shareholder value"
Gee, Alain how long does it take to co-burn 100M$ on marketing? :)
I am sure if they let you burn that kind of money they must have made more, this way or another. even if just in wider perspective. VCs for example, like film studios, love to loose money. its part of the game of being there with the one out of 100 winners, right?