The Musings Of An Opinionated Sod [Help Me Grow!]

Ambiguous Promises …

So I got given a business card from a media person at Zenith and was quite taken aback by their ‘strapline’ … the R.O.I. agency.

As much as R.O.I. could stand for Really Ordinary Individuals … the reality is, of course that it stands for Return On Investment … another phrase in the marketing dictionary that has little or no meaning.

What do I mean by that?

Well there’s a few things …

1 Advertising is never the be-all and end-all interms of a campaigns success – factors like product, packaging, price, competition and distribution all have an incredible influence – so no company can ever claim to be directly responsible for R.O.I.

2 Given R.O.I. can be evaluated in many ways – from sales divided by costs / shareprice increase / improvement in production output / staff morale – what evaluation criteria are they actually basing their claim on?

3 At what point does a communication company acknowledge their involvement in the campaign is over?  They could claim their influence carries on for months, which sort of increases the opportunity of achieving this mythical R.O.I.

4. What ‘costs’ does a company include in its R.O.I. calculation?  Production? Media? Sales Kits? Distribution? Packaging? Promotions?

Of course clients [and agencies] need to evaluate whether their hard work has been fruitful [read: successful] or not … and of course, the methodologies used are probably the ‘best of what is available’ … however for a company to come out and say they are the Return On Investment agency when they play a small [though admittedly important] part in the process, amazed me.

Sadly I can see a lot of clients falling for this sort of marketing hyperbole because the standard of marketer is declining almost at the same pace as the standard of agency leader … plus in Asia, the region is so corporate-focused, their obsession is always on the ‘bottom line’ [the standard of work is a distant second] … however given this agency is publically screaming an obvious exaggeration of its capabilities, you have to question whether they’re the sort of people you’d really be able to trust working on your business.

It’s abit like DM companies …

Don’t get me wrong, I totally appreciate the value of DM [when it’s done right it’s great, but too often CRM seems to stand for Customer Revulsion Marketing] … however what really bugs me is that so many of them ponce around like they are the only comms discipline that is truly effective when in reality, all they are, is a comms discipline that can prove how INEFFECTIVE they are.

Being able to quantify exactly how many people responded to a specific ad doesn’t mean you are an effective medium … just a knowledgeable one … and yet I see all these DM companies, like Zenith, shouting out massive claims like “Obsessed With Results“, “You Know Where You Are With Us” and “Facts Not Promises“.

As I said, DM has a place and – when done right – a real value … however I don’t think they can claim to be an effective comms channel any more than Zenith can claim to be a R.O.I. company but hey, in the World of marketing, spin seems to continually be ‘in’.

Maybe I should point them to this post!

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