Return on investment.
It would seem to me that in most other walks of life you know what you’re getting. I go to the supermarket and come out with £50 worth of food – job done. Go to the pub and get three pints for £10.40 (country prices, not London). Even pay the council tax and know that one day that hole the size of a Roman Emperors ego, outside my house, will be fixed. But why, oh why, when it comes to advertising are we so slow off the mark when it comes to testing whether what we’ve produced has worked? It’s not just down to ads but ideas. That beautiful, carefully crafted idea that we try hard to sell to clients, would surely be easier to sell if we knew that what we had previously developed had in fact worked. I find it a bizarre conflict that us, as pharma agencies, work with some of the best research specialists in the world (clients) – phase 1, 2, 3 and 4 clinical trials, the money that gets poured into it and yet there seems to be little demand to test the agency and their ‘mettle’. Come on – have a go if you think you’re hard enough.
So, my thought for the day, or should that be week, year, infinity is link communication (and ideas) to business performance. Communications are paid for out of profit (or if you get it wrong, loss), so demand to know what has worked and what hasn’t. If nothing else, in today’s lean times it may just be easier to hang onto your budget if you can prove that past activity has benefited the brand.
Advertising is a long way from the bottom line. Nobody wants food, beer, or advertising, they are a means to an end. The food you bought for £50 to satisfy your need for either the taste experience or body fuel may be wasted if you don’t cook it well, or find time to eat it before it goes off because you had to leave for Helsinki after an urgent phone call. The beer you bought because you wanted to buy time in the pub with friends or just to get a beer buzz may be wasted if they don’t turn up or the alcohol just isn’t working for you that day, or it tastes bad. Advertising is like that; a great campaign may be wasted if the client sales force is rubbish, the product goes out of stock or is recalled because of a horrible new side-effect, or a far better product just becomes available, or the client suddenly decides marketing priorities lie elsewhere. Measuring advertising effectiveness requires isolating that one factor from all the others that affect the outcome; surprisingly difficult. The IPA Advertising Effectiveness Award (does it still exist?) required a huge investment of time and money to enter for (I did it years ago) and you could still pick a myriad holes in its design. Here’s a question then; how would you recover the cost/time of measuring/researching advertising effectiveness without that just adding to the drain on YOUR bottom line? Would the end result be so convincing that clients would beat a path to your door, budgets in hand? Would your competitors pick holes in your research methodology and sneer at you conclusions? Return on investment is multifactorial and hedged about with risks and unknowns. The day you go the hardware store and say you want a 5mm drill and you get the reply that, no you don’t, you want a 5mm hole in the wall… is the day you remember the smart reply that, no I don’t, I want to hang the picture on the wall …and then find that the person you hoped to impress with your picture doesn’t like Jackson Pollock at all….
July 29th, 2010 | 6:53am
by Gavn Dalglish