I am a huge believer in being able to quantify results because if you don’t do that, you can’t expect to get the money you believe you deserve.
I must admit in Asia, I’ve found it quite difficult to get clients to quantify their business expectations – not because of their ability – but because out here the role of marketing tends to be more about ‘producing stuff’, than ‘producing results’.
In other words the focus of the average brand manager is to create whatever promotional material their sales teams wants [demands] rather than drive ideas that can motivate the masses to do what ultimately their business [and their customers] want.
This situation might sound like a dream come true for certain ad agencies but it’s this lack of responsibility that I believe has contributed to the low value many companies regard adland with.
I know there are many people out there who think ‘awareness’ is a valid metric but I don’t.
Of course awareness can contribute to a brands success but that should never be enough of a strategic target because ultimately, clients hire us to make them more money and if we fail to recognize that – and put in place targets that can demonstrate that – we are failing our industry.
You see I don’t believe brand value and sales value need be mutually exclusive – infact in these hard economic times, I’d argue it is irresponsible to treat them as separate entities.
This doesn’t mean ads have to feature great big yellow fucking starbursts or pricing on every ad – it means embracing every discipline within marketing, including the sales, distribution and R&D channels because contrary to what some in adland think, they have as big an influence on how well your 30 seconds of CGI glory works as anything else.
Anyway, I’m going off tangent and whilst I’ve just said a lot of Asian advertising has little or no definable targets for its communication, not every company acts this way – which is why what I’m going to write now may seem abit mad … but hey that’s something you should be used to by now.
Right, an issue that is bothering me is organizations obsession with measurability.
Believe it or not, I’m not contradicting what I said at the beginning of this post … the issue I’m talking about is that too many organisations regard ‘measurability’ as the most important element of anything they do, rather than making the important things, measurable.
Am I making clear here?
Just incase, what I’m trying to say is that too many clients care more about measuring how many people see their campaign rather than what the communication actually achieves.
What this means is that companies are getting commended for their mass market mainstream communication strategies [ie: brainwashing] rather than rating it’s actual effectiveness which is probably contributing to the traditional approach to mass marketing and communication despite almost everyone in the industry accepting it’s effectiveness is not as powerful as it used to be or it should.
To be honest, I’m amazed companies seem to be happy paying continually higher and higher rates for less and less audience – but I guess when you are in a culture of risk adversity [despite what all the companies may say] it’s what is bound to happen.
One thing that really upsets me with all this is that the industry mags are seemingly perpetuating this madness by running columns that talk about ‘which ad has had the greatest recall’.
Week after week we see bland brands with huge budgets getting labeled as the most ‘effective’ interms of recall when the reality is either [1] that ‘recall’ is having little benefit interms of sales or [2] they own so much of the key distribution channels, that they’d get the majority of their sales with little or no advertising anyway.
Until the industry stops its obsession with blanket measurability and starts focusing on what actually needs to be measured, we’re going to continue down the slippery slope of corporate irrelevance and that’s a terrible thing because adland has the power to make a bigger difference to companies, people and society than every brand and management consultant put together.