It appears that there is growing concern in AdLand about Google's...

...online dominance. This is all so strange, we are talking here about an

unproven medium, where any number of well respected people have voiced

opinions as to the appropriateness, or otherwise, as to using the Internet as an

(traditional) advertising medium.

Jerry Della Femina claims that most online advertising creates resentment,

working to shut down attention rather than elicit interest. Zergio Zyman feels

that banner ads are a joke, and Della Femina goes on to say "and figure out

different ways to reach people but we're not going to reach them by advertising

on the internet".

In Marketing Management, Philip Kotler had this to say, "To remain effective

and profitable, marketers must strike the delicate balance between the

ineffectiveness of trying to be all things to all people through mass marketing,

and the cost prohibitive extreme of completely customising a marketing mix to

each individual". Doesn't this logic admit that mass marketing is a thing of

the past?

And isn't the Internet a highly sophisticated form of mass marketing? You have

to remember that it is all being driven by the mass marketing mentalities of

AdLand and associates. All driven by data based technologies which invariably

boil down to marketing to a mass of niches, make no mistake about it, the

purportedly "Personalised" approaches to customers remain a form of mass

marketing.

What Top-Down-Management hasn't cottoned on to is the fact that the Internet

is a bottoms-up medium (if that is what you would call it!) and people are

connecting with each other and most certainly not with advertising. Only TV

commercials may create brand awareness, on the web they only create

annoyance! Meanwhile back at the ranch Online advertising remains a

relatively small part of the over-all advertising market, £2 billion out of a total

of £17 billion in the UK but it is growing rapidly by as much as 41% last year.

Meanwhile Top-Down-Management is doing its bit to help mediocrity

maintain its presence within the Advertising world, already it appears that they

are fiddling the books. Clients have already noticed discrepancies between the

number of clicks (per online ad) that Google has charged them for and the

number they reach by their own assessments! Nothing has changed in

AdLand, nothing at all! And the sad thing is that all of this need never

to have taken place, there is a substantially (and proven) more effective

method of communication available, which uses existing media. It is called

Interactive Marketing Communication, and it is available to you right now!

　

　

　

Game Playing and Marketing Games Offer you a Unique Way to Entertain...



-- and sell at the same time!

Whilst experimenting with social networks, user-generated content and on line video,

marketers appear content to view games as little more than another

class advertising platform. The untapped potential of game

playing lies in their ability to tell stories, thereby more closely linking

brand benefits with game play and blurring the lines between brand and

entertainment. Games, properly structured, fundamentally alter the customers

perception to the presentation and content of your marketing messages thus

making the advertisements themselves a

source of meaningful information. Games allow Brands to become

engaging, and entertaining -- thereby providing something of value in exchange for attention.

Brands such as Persil, Birds Eye and Quaker Oats have relied on game playing to create

narratives that consumers want to be a part of. In the process, they've done

more than just break through the clutter, or better position themselves in

consumer's minds. Games remain one of the biggest untapped

opportunities for marketers, for the simple fact that they are, indeed, engaging

interactive and entertaining. Well-conceived games require users' active

attention and enable them to drive the story line as they experience a world

that can be entirely of a brand's making. Games represent a unique opportunity

for brands to be the entertainment rather than just sponsor it.

So what do original games get you? If you're Quaker Oats,

you get year-over-year double-digit sales growth, as well as a

marketing program that has generated significant

revenue. So what does this mean for marketers? It

demonstrates that there's a burgeoning mainstream audience increasingly

receptive to branded entertainment in the form of original episodic games and

willing to grant brands their attention in exchange for enjoyable

experiences. Games need to be implemented strategically.

As with any marketing approach, objectives and performance expectations for

game-based marketing need to be considered upfront. Here are some things to keep

in mind: A game tends to work best as a component of an integrated campaign

rather than an afterthought. Original episodic games can

counteract this imbalance by delivering a high level of play and replay value to

consumers while putting the brand at the center of the experience.

So does a brand need to be interesting or provocative in order to make a

good game? Absolutely not. All our examples show that basic games deployed and

used well were effective at making a low-involvement category more interesting

and engaging. And implemented properly, games could address many of the

challenges facing financial-services companies -- building involvement,

generating a prospect , creating a sense of community, even delivering a positive brand halo.

　

The current advertising market is in meltdown...



　

The advertising boom of yesteryear will forever be associated with the credit boom. Just as the values of that economic system are now discredited, so to will be the values of the marketing and advertising boom that went with it.

... with audiences disappearing, TV rates plummeting and clients cutting already slender budgets. Perhaps we should be rejoicing that the days of hype and excess are finally over.
The advertising boom of yesteryear will forever be associated with the credit boom. Just as the values of that economic system are now discredited, so to will be the values of the marketing and advertising boom that went with it.
In the future we will no longer have high regard of advertising/marketing that is mass-produced. We will be amazed that Clients, like Guinness, will have paid 15 million pounds for the production of a TV commercial.
Marketing is everything a company does to acquire customers and maintain a relationship with them. Even the small tasks like writing thank-you letters, playing golf with a prospective client, returning calls promptly and meeting with a past client for coffee can be thought of as marketing.
The all-embracing concept of marketing has been lost on a lot of companies, resulting in a poisoning of the well, a deeply ingrained lack of trust that, now has become an enormous obstacle to overcome:
Marketers have spammed, lied, deceived, cluttered and ripped us off for so long, we’re sick of it.
Which means that even if you have a really good reason, no, you can’t call me on the phone. Which means that even if it’s really important, no, I’m not going to read the instructions. Which means that god forbid you try to email me something I didn’t ask for… you’re trashed. It’s so fashionable to be sceptical now that no one believes you if you attempt to do something for the right reasons.
Like all those packaged-up bundles of bad debt, contemporary advertising had no fundamental value. It was misplaced faith in future economic growth that drove up the values of 30-second TV commercials!
The Clients spent so much money on advertising because they believed that they were living in the best of times and that it was all just a one way street - upwards! We all now know all this wasn't true.
In the years to come this advertising will be seen as the ultimate symbol of the economic fairyland we have been living through in the past five years, an era in which the world lost touch with its sense of value. These were not masterpieces of advertising

, they were the icons of idiocy.

　

　

Consumers are deaf to the babble of the advertising class.

It is true to say that all the advertising in the world won't bring the customers back!

Spending a huge fortune on TV advertising?

Rest assured these days your advertising slipped into the huge gulf of

mistrust, disbelief and total lack of interest that now separates the

Advertising Class from everybody else. This gulf is so full of disbelieved

advertising and ignored blogs,sales promotion gimmicks,direct marketing and

irrelevant banners/radio commercials.

The cynicism about advertising is so pervasive that it embraces almost all

marketing activity. Use a statistic? It's a lie. This cynicism extends to

the media, all advertising is seen as fiction inside an untruth wrapped in a piece

of spin! Most advertising proceeds as if there was still a reasonable degree

of trust. As if the message was still getting through, still be listened to,

still being weighed up. It must be hard to be in Advertising and to carry on if

the truth were faced.

For example, the rubbish that the food industry has fed people for decades,

along with its (literally) toxic products and the lies and omissions that it has

disseminated, well now is the time to challenge this concerted project of

misinformation, corruption and silence together with the programme to keep

people as ignorant as possible about factory farming. Myths trotted out

regularly.

The incredible plethora of choices consumers now possess has a downside, and

it's called exhaustion. An overwhelming number of possibilities complicates

every buying decision. Add to that all the other more baroque aspects of modern

life, such as two-income households, frequent divorce.

and remarriage and blending of increasing traffic,

shortening news cycles, and 100 channels of cable television, and you wind up

with a consumer group that feels very over loaded and harassed.

Stand back. Stop thinking like the operator and start thinking like a

customer. Better, talk to real customers. Or, better still, to real

non-customers. What do they want? What is missing for them? Customer focus is

important all the time, and is one of the main advantages that small firms enjoy

over their apparently stronger and more profitable larger rivals. In good

economic times, it's almost inevitable that, for big companies, the needs of

customers will drop down the list of corporate priorities, to some degree. This

creates an opportunity for small firms with a distinctive customer offering to

move in and clean up.

What has emerged from the data available,

was clear evidence of the lack of credibility or engagement that most brands

can expect from their forays into social media.

A spokesman for TNS said "Many brands have recognised the vast potential

audiences available to them on social networks; however, they are failing to

understand that these spaces belong to the consumer and brand presence needs

to be proportionate and justified."

However when you use Interactive Marketing Communication you get total

engagement and total credibility. Seeking more information on Interactive

MarketingCommunication?...contact Paul Ashby on (UK) 01934 620047 or

paulashby40@yahoo.com

Advertising Agencies have treated consumers as a Ponzi scheme.



Success in marketing and advertising has been bought by promises with costs far in excess

of reality. We have hoped for a tomorrow in which record sales growth will yield

record levels of marketing expenditures to cover the promises when they come due

The problem?....tomorrow never comes!! Our legacy to our successors should

not be temporary austerity but a permant, massive reform of Marketing and

Advertising. We have to be unflinching and utterly practical in recognising the

scale of the challange.

The desperate need to restructure advertising and marketing.

Only interactive marketing communication will provide clients with the

necessary communication and feedback necessary for effective marketing to take

place.

For too long, marketing functions have been vertically organised by media

type. This approach is mirrored on the agency side, with rewards based on

discipline-specific P&L models. These must be torn down.

On the client-side Marketing and Brand Managers must involve and lead a team

of colleagues who have the responsibility, vision, understanding and commitment

to engage in a media-agnostic planning process. And this team of enlightened

marketers must be willing to let strategic goals -- not historic patterns --

drive budget allocations.

Achieving strategic integration requires a top-to-bottom reinvention of the

marketing organisation. Holistic professionals who are system thinkers,

customer-centric believers, innovators and dreamers must lead this

transformation.

And Interactive Communication must lead the way in all your marketing communications

　

Free... As In Doughnuts



I know a guy who spends hours looking for illegal MP3s to avoid paying $.99

on iTunes. Some people are likely to prefer watching ads to paying for content

despite all the drawbacks. The point is not that advertising is

bad for everyone in every situation. But it is unfortunate that advertising is

so often seen as the best or only way to make money from digital wares.

It's worth remembering that ad-financed television came to the fore at a time

when no alternative would have been feasible. The technical challenges of the

day involved getting a decent picture on a 17" CRT without standing next to the set holding the

antenna all evening. Subscription or pay-per-view models were not in the cards. Now we have the

technology to meter and charge for content in many new ways, but we've gotten into the habit of

expecting TV shows to be free.

One of the quirks of human psychology is that, once we get used to free doughnuts, we are enraged

by the idea that we might have to pay for them.

If we succumb willingly to disfigured television shows, psychological

manipulation and higher prices on SUVs and shampoo so that we can avoid paying a

few dollars for entertainment and internet services, we have no one to blame but

ourselves. When the most frightening hoax imaginable is that Facebook

will start charging users, we can hardly blame them for slathering more and

more lucrative ads onto their website. It would be fantastic if creative types

were to look for less intrusive ways of financing their work. But that is

unlikely to happen until consumers start to realize that free is sometimes the

most expensive price of all. And best told by interactive communication!

Dead Air More Effective Than Facebook Ads

The broadcast industry has a term called "dead air." It occurs when there's a

mistake or a technical glitch that results in no audio on radio, or no picture

on a TV screen. A blank TV screen is "dead air." In an absolutely

astounding experiment, the banner advertising equivalent of dead air -- a blank

display ad -- performed better than the average Facebook ad; twice as good as

the average "branding" display ad; and only one click in ten thousand worse than

the average of all display ads. Here are the details. AdAge

this week has a piece called How Blank Display Ads Managed to Tot Up Some Impressive Numbers.

The article was written by Ted McConnell, exec VP-digital for the Advertising

Research Foundation. Ted and a few friends (an astrophysicist from an

online analytics firm, a measurement expert from the Advertising Research

Foundation, and an ad-platform wizard from a buying and optimization company)

decided to do an experiment. The experiment was designed to discover how much

clicking of banner advertising was actual engagement with the ad, and how much

was just noise -- people clicking for no reason. To do this they created

a unique ad -- an ad with no message. A blank. According to McConnell...

"We created six blank ads in three IAB standard sizes, and two colors, white and orange. We

trafficked the ads via a demand-side platform (DSP) with a low bid. We started with run of

exchange, and in another phase trafficked to "named publishers" that would accept unaudited

copy." Here are the results:

The click-through rate on the blank ads was .08%. According to published

reports, the click-through rate on the average Facebook ad is about .05%. The

blank ad performed 60% better.

The click through rate for the blank ad was about double the average

click-through rate for a "branding" display ad (an ad without an offer.)

The click-through rate on the average banner ad is .09%. This means the

blank ad drew one click in ten thousand fewer than an average banner ad.

About .04% of the clicks were mistakes. Since the average click-through rate

for display ads is .09%, this indicates that it is possible that as much as 44%

of banner ad clicks are mistakes. The astounding thing is that with all

the data Facebook is collecting, all the geniuses we have analyzing display ad

results, all the space-age targeting we are constantly being beaten over the

head with, and all the young creative prodigies lecturing us on the magic of

online advertising, empty ads outperformed our online geniuses.

You simply cannot make this shit up.

　

Talentless Advertising

The advertising management's silence over the constantly emerging evidence

that advertising does not work speaks far too loudly.

Glaciers are melting more speedily than the ability of advertising to become

accountable. What is surprising is that a global commercial organization such

as advertising can operate like this. Advertising agencies act as if it has

no need to answer to their Clients! Advertising Management has been tested and

found wanting. What all this is showing is that the Senior Management, those at

the top of the Agencies, are not working. There is a communications and

management failure within advertising agencies.

Everyone is saying it (or, to be more accurate, whining about it). The

advertising business is in a state of upheaval. Everyone is blaming it on

technology and the rapid rate of change it is causing. Hello -- it isn't the

technology, folks. The technological change is simply making it easier to

diagnose the real challenge. The one that has been around since the dawn of our

industry but that, thankfully, we've been able to side step.

The decline of moral responsibility has damaged the advertising and marketing

industry, it is the real flaw behind the advertising crisis. There has to be a

complete change of thinking and regulation of the world's marketing industry.

Certainly Clients cannot risk again the degree of unaccountability as have be

practiced up to now. Advertising agencies need to change their behavior, they

need to re-establish relations with their Clients and gain a better

understanding of the communication process...by using Interactive Marketing Communication,

properly executed!

Talentless Advertising!

　

　
The advertising management's silence over the constantly emerging evidence

that advertising does not work speaks far too loudly.

Glaciers are melting more speedily than the ability of advertising to become

accountable. What is surprising is that a global commercial organization such

as advertising can operate like this. Advertising agencies act as if it has

no need to answer to their Clients! Advertising Management has been tested and

found wanting. What all this is showing is that the Senior Management, those at

the top of the Agencies, are not working. There is a communications and

management failure within advertising agencies.

Everyone is saying it (or, to be more accurate, whining about it). The

advertising business is in a state of upheaval. Everyone is blaming it on

technology and the rapid rate of change it is causing. Hello -- it isn't the

technology, folks. The technological change is simply making it easier to

diagnose the real challenge. The one that has been around since the dawn of our

industry but that, thankfully, we've been able to side step.

The decline of moral responsibility has damaged the advertising and marketing

industry, it is the real flaw behind the advertising crisis. There has to be a

complete change of thinking and regulation of the world's marketing industry.

Certainly Clients cannot risk again the degree of unaccountability as have be

practiced up to now. Advertising agencies need to change their behavior, they

need to re-establish relations with their Clients and gain a better

understanding of the communication process...by using Interactive Marketing Communication,

properly executed!

The techno-crowd in both the education and advertising industry...

The techno-crowd in both the education and advertising industry have a lot in

common.

They are very strong in their assertions, and very weak on proof.

They continue to inflate the hysterical threat-of-not-accepting-their-solution language, despite

contradictory data.

They think anecdotes are evidence.

When data does not support their position, they jump to false goals -- like the dubious fashionable-yet

-bankrupt "engagement" argument.There is a lesson to be learned here. Whether you are selling

cheeseburgers, trying to lift the educational achievement of children, or

operating in any other field of endeavor, technology has so far proven to be no

substitute for strategy.

Advertising will fail for three reasons:

There are three problems with advertising in any form, whether broadcast or

Consumers do not trust advertising.

Dan Ariely has demonstrated that messages attributed to a commercial source have much lower

credibility and much lower impact on the perception of product quality than the same message

attributed to a rating service. Forrester Research has completed studies that show that

advertising and company sponsored blogs are the least-trusted source of

information on products and services, while recommendations from friends and

online reviews from customers are the highest.

Consumers do not want to view advertising. Think of watching network TV news and remember that

the commercials on all the major networks are as closely synchronized as possible.

Why? If network executives believed we all wanted to see the ads they would be staggered, so that

users could channel surf to view the ads; ads are synchronized so that users cannot

channel surf to avoid the ads. Consumers do not need advertising.

My own research suggests that consumers behave as if they

get much of their information about product offerings from the internet, through

independent professional rating sites or community content rating services like


www.ratebeer.com/" http://www.tripadvisor.com/"

We must dismiss the wretched word "Subliminal"

Can we please dismiss the meaningless word "Subliminal" from our advertising

jargon!

There was -- and still is -- little proof that these efforts to engineer action

through manipulation of the unconscious led to any behavioral changes

favorable to specific marketers. As for James Vicary's experiment in

subliminal advertising -- it was a hoax: Vicary later admitted that he

hadn't done what he'd claimed. Several subsequent studies of the

effectiveness of embedded messages have shown it to be virtually

impossible to use them to produce specific, predictable responses.

Still, faith in the power of the media to induce millions of people to

act contrary to their better judgment or conscious desires remains

profound. More than three quarters of the U.S. population currently

believes that marketers use subliminal messages to sell products or

services, according to the Journal of Advertising Research; consumers

themselves spend some $50 million annually on subliminal self-help

products, such as audiotapes that are supposed to teach one a foreign

language in one's sleep.

There is only one form of effective, accountable advertising and that is Interactive Marketing

Communication.

NEED WE SAY MORE?

For every 10,000 ads they deliver, Facebook gets 5 clicks. What would you want to sell?

The web has turned us all into liars

We pretend the web has opened up huge new advertising opportunities when we secretly know

that it has mostly been a dismal failure as an advertising medium. We cling to the few big successes

and argue from the extreme. We pretend we know how to "do it all", but we don't. We

pretend to be "media neutral" but secretly are either broadcast-centric, print-centric or web-centric.

When will we discover the real meaning of the word "communication" and start practicing real

interactive communication? Because that's what it's all about!

It is refreshing to hear more discussion around the shortcomings of social media....

... rather than the constant proselytizing of a still baby-fresh and

misunderstood communication channel. However, possibly a more constructive way

of thinking about those shortcomings is to consider the growing gap in

expectations of what social media can and should achieve for a brand.

The IBM Institute of Business Value just published a study

comparing the differing perceptions of business leaders and consumers regarding

social sites. The most interesting find from the study was the ironic business

misperception that consumer's would rank discounts and purchase opportunities at

the bottom of their list of reasons to engage with a company's social site. It

actually ranks at the top of their list.

Companies need to design experiences that deliver tangible value in return

for customers' time, attention, endorsement and data. -IBM Institute of

Business Value.

Time and attention really are the currencies of our customers. Those expenses

are precious for them and they want something in return for it. Simply providing

conversation's will never be enough. No brand is interesting enough to entice

just by being available. Although the social space is cheaper, quicker, and

ever-present, a brand still needs to provide those nuggets of material value to

drive significant engagement.

And Interactive Communication does all that...and more!

There is an old advertising joke which goes like this:

a man dies and while he stands at St. Peter's doors an angel takes him on a small

tour of both Heaven and Hell to help him decide where he'd choose to go. Heaven

was all peace and quiet while Hell was full of nightclubs, loud music, beautiful

women and alcohol. The man decides he'll spend eternity in Hell but once he

passed Lucifer's door he saw a completely different place; screaming, suffering,

mutilated bodies, pain and hellfire. He tells Lucifer that wasn't what he saw

and signed up for and Lucifer answers:

"Yesterday, you were a prospect. Today, you are a client"

It is not a good joke but it is very characteristic of where the advertising industry stands right now.

Advertising, in all its possible formats, is in the middle of a major identity crisis. Huge amounts of

money are being spent every day on TV ad slots, online banners, mobile push

notifications, search results but believe me, no one knows what they are doing.

Brands dedicate a big ad budget every year because this is what every competitor

is also doing, ad and media agencies are trying to deliver good results on this

budget but no one can really say what the ROI is and consumers are caught up in

the middle of this, having lost all trust in advertising.

A vivid example of how people act towards advertising nowadays is the emergence of software

technologies, which enable users to block not only online display banners but all

TV advertising as well. The industry, instead of decoding the clear signs that consumers are sending,

condemns these kinds of technologies. But when you use Interactive Communication, properly

executed, things change, substantially. for the better!

Brands ・wasting time and money on misguided digital strategies, study

UK social media users are among the most resistant consumers in the world towards brands invading their personal space, according to a new study, which reflects how businesses are wasting time and money trying to reach people online who, in all likelihood, probably aren・t listening.


Data revealed by TNS Digital Life　 found that 61% of UK consumers do not want to engage with brands in their social networks, a figure that is slightly above average (57%) from other developed markets studied.In stark contrast, fast-growing markets, mainly across Asia, South America and Africa, are much more open to brands online. About 60% of consumers there see social networks as a good place to learn about brands.

In Europe, however,  the numbers seem bleak in comparison TNS suggests that misguided digital strategies are generating ・mountains of digital waste,・ from friendless Facebook accounts to blogs no one reads.

This is being combined with ever-increasing content produced by consumers ・ the study shows 47% of digital consumers now comment about brands online.

The result is huge volumes of noise, which is polluting the digital world and making it harder for brands to be heard ・ presenting a major challenge for businesses trying to enter into dialogue with consumers online.

The study also sheds some light on why people do engage with brands online. More often than not, motivations of online commentators can be self-serving. 61% of consumers are driven to engage with brands online by a promotion or special offer.

About 46% of consumers motivated to post comments on companies do so for the simple desire to impart advice, while more people like to praise than complain online (13% v 10%).

According to marketing consultant, Richard Hillgrove the problem for many brands is the message.

・People in the UK don・t want obvious messages. It・s the same way Britain has largely rejected product placement on television. We don・t like things ・in our face・ ・ the Americans don・t seem to mind.・To achieve success online please use Interactive Marketing Communication @ Paul Ashby (UK) 01934-520047 or paulashby40@yahoo.com

Making Marketing Measure

For years, corporate marketers have walked into budget meetings like

neighborhood junkies. They couldn't always justify how well they spent past

handouts or what difference it all made. They just wanted more money -- for

flashy TV ads, for big-ticket events, for, you know, getting out the message and

building up the brand.

But those heady days of blind budget increases are fast being replaced

with a new mantra: measurement and accountability. Armed with reams of data,

increasingly sophisticated tools, and growing evidence that the old tricks

simply don't work, there's hardly a marketing executive today who isn't

demanding a more scientific approach to help defend marketing strategies in

front of the chief financial officer. Marketers want to know the actual return

on investment (ROI) of each dollar. They want to know it often, not just

annually. And increasingly they want a view of likely returns on future

campaigns. "Marketing has gone from being a cost or expense to an investment,"

notes Martyn Straw, chief strategy officer of ad agency BBDO Worldwide, who says honing an ROI system for clients is his main job. "Call marketing an equity investment, and suddenly there's lots of accountability in the room." The push is coming from the top ranks. CEOs, CFOs, and even board

directors, have relentlessly cut costs in every corner of their companies except

marketing and are fed up with funneling cash into TV commercials and glossy ads

that they say cost more and seem to do less. That's especially true at a time

when profits are under attack and consumers of all ages are zapping ads and

spending more time playing video games and surfing the Internet. The bean

counters know that marketing matters. But they're hazy about how much or what

kind.

That's one reason companies are increasingly shifting their dollars from

TV and print ads to the Net and direct marketing. They can get a swift and

accurate measure of the impact of their efforts for a fraction of the cost of

advertising in traditional media. DaimlerChrysler , for example, is relying less on 30-second TV ads in favor of events where names, profiles, and addresses of prospects can be collected and tracked. It's

also pushing direct marketing and online advertising where response rates are

easily measured. "You better believe my money is chasing media and marketing

outlets that can prove their return in hard data," says Jeff Bell,

vice-president- Chrysler/Jeep marketing.

Companies in every segment of American business have become obsessed with

honing the science of measuring marketing performance. Consumer-products giants

such as Procter & Gamble, Kraft Foods , and Gillette are further along this path, having long chased statistics to link different forms of marketing to sales and brand awareness. But the desire to

construct a comprehensive set of performance measures -- what many call a

marketing "dashboard" -- is fast extending to marketers in other industries as

well. Xerox Corp. uses the measurement techniques of Six Sigma to analyze marketing's impact

on a range of measures, from leads generated to cost per sale. Home Depot Inc.

has a proprietary computer model with sophisticated algorithms that

correlate marketing investments with product sales and regional variations that

have led the retailer, for example, to push paint using radio spots in some

markets and newspaper inserts in others. "Marketing ROI is one of the most

difficult things to measure in retailing because of all the details," says John

Costello, executive vice-president for merchandising and marketing. But, he

adds, the ability to do it right is fast becoming a competitive advantage.

For many, the goal is to identify and cultivate potential buyers -- and

then track whether they respond to marketing efforts by ultimately making a

purchase. Mark R. LaNeve, head of North American marketing and advertising for

General Motors Corp. , cites customer tracking as the carmaker's top priority. "We do less and

less advertising simply because it feels right," says LaNeve. There are no more

sponsored golf tournaments, for example, unless the sponsoring brand collects a

healthy number of customer profiles through test drives. Those people are then

tracked every time GM runs into them through a similar event or mailing and

again when they buy a GM vehicle. Such measures have helped GM halve Cadillac's

marketing spending over the last three years while increasing sales, market

share, and awareness. Although marketing giants such as GM know they have to be

on TV to launch models and blitz airwaves with a new rebate deal, the share of

the marketing budget going to network TV is steadily declining. LaNeve says he

knows with 98% certainty what the payoff of a direct-marketing campaign will be

before committing a cent. Yet the impact of image-building TV and print ads --

as opposed to those pitching rebates -- remains mostly "a mystery or educated

guess." Indeed, the Holy Grail of measurement is to figure out the impact of

traditional mass advertising, especially the 30-second TV commercial. One of the

most elaborate efforts involves a joint venture between Arbitron Inc.

, a media and marketing research firm, and VNU

the Dutch media company that owns Nielsen. "Project Apollo" next year will

begin tracking the media habits of 30,000 households representing 70,000

consumers. "Panelists" wear a pager-like device that picks up all the

electronically coded TV and radio they consume. That data, plus online usage and

grocery purchases scanned in half the households, and frequent surveys of

attitudes and lifestyle choices should help advertisers figure out which of

their marketing tactics really pay. Procter & Gamble Co.

which spent $4.4 billion on advertising in the last fiscal year, has

already signed on as a subscriber. P&G is looking for the system to tell it

whether it's better off funding an end-aisle display in 2,000 grocery stores or

increasing its radio ad buy for a month in the same markets. "It's not

perfect," admits Arbitron's project head Linda Dupree. "But the information they

get will be the best they have ever had."

PERFORMANCE ANXIETY

Because advertisers work with multiple ad agencies there's a push to

establish some benchmarks and standards for measuring ROI. The CMO Council, a

Silicon Valley network of close to 1,000 chief marketing officers at tech

companies, released an extensive report of marketing performance measurements in

October. Merely counting eyeballs no longer seemed enough once the tech bubble

burst, says the report's editor-in-chief, William Glazier. Yet fewer than 15% of

council members have a comprehensive model in place. For all the effort to bring science to marketing, the art component will never go away. Figuring out how much of a product's appeal is due to marketing

and how much stems from innovative features or quality is often hard to pin

down, even for individual consumers. They don't know why they like it, they just

do. That's the human factor -- and so far, no one has found a way to measure

that.