It’s great to see that TAM and IAPI are really grasping the nettle and demonstrating the key commercial role & commercial value of advertising.
Throughout my own career, both as a marketer and as a consultant, I have found it frustrating how marketing, the engine for generating consumer demand, can lack sufficient clout and influence within the Boardroom. This has been because in many cases we, as marketers, have sometimes been our own worst enemies – we can get immersed in visions, campaign ideas and innovative ‘firsts’- and fail to clearly communicate the financial return that we deliver to the CEO, CFO and total organisation.
Industry initiatives such as “The Value of advertising” are a key tool for balancing the “art” & the “science” of marketing and in the process helping redress any over emphasis on “the how” rather than “the what”.
If we are really about understanding these audiences, we need to put a bit of time and rigour into demonstrating what we have returned to the business in hard returns. Marketing is the engine for consumer demand, so we have to be the engineers with metrics and results as our specifications.
Be it sales, enquiries, revenue, market share or advertising effectiveness data, these are the hard facts that will drive real appreciation & recognition in the boardroom for great creative thinking, planning and understanding of our consumers.
In my current role in AIB, the team recently delivered a campaign where we were able to measure the level of on line & telesales engagement and sales response to our communication on a minute by minute basis and then use the data to prove the financial case for incremental marketing investment and the overall value of effective marketing. Just to be clear – this is not about drowning in data and getting lost in a forest of metrics – this is about having the confidence and clarity to measure and learn from each campaign we run to ensure we are seen as a key component in any conversation on investment & revenue.
On a personal level, I was very reassured by the finding that campaigns delivered with creative excellence and stand out are on average ten times more media efficient than non-awarded campaigns. I am delighted that this research demonstrates that great advertising when delivered can produce step change performance rather than incremental results. Great advertising can deliver great results – Mediocre work won’t. In an unprecedentedly complex and busy consumer media landscape this means that Marketing has never been more challenging but importantly never a more exciting a place to be. From an AIB perspective, over the last 2 years we have focused on creating positive disruption with our customers in many advertising varied forms – whether it is sending Ireland’s best GAA stars to live the lives of professional baseball & soccer players in “The Toughest Trade” TV documentary or following our customers who have taken out loans to capture and tell their personal stories. These are examples of where delivering a compelling advertising story creates enormous media value to an organization.
The findings from this analysis have also proven that media investment and share of voice is a very important lever for commercial return. Once again, this is a key finding for Marketers when engaging in investment discussions with senior stakeholders within an organization. It is very tempting to over focus on the power of disruption and being a challenger brand and to start believing that a powerful creative idea can compensate for little or no investment spend. Of course there are great examples when a Cadbury ‘Gorilla’ or AIB ‘The Toughest’ goes viral and social sharing can offset paid media. But these are the exceptions -share of voice is still a vital competitive source of leverage. Share of voice still delivers market share performance. Getting the balance between great advertising ideas and the right level of media investment is like getting the right driver into the right Formula 1 car. You can have the best driver in the world but if you don’t invest in delivering the best car for him, you’re unlikely to win the race, despite his talent. Advertising is the same – you maximize the chances of success for your great campaign by investing in appropriate media levels.
Speaking as a client, it’s great to work with Creative & Media agencies that are motivated by your commercial objectives & results and are prepared to design their campaigns and measure their campaigns in those terms. This goes way beyond KPI’s appearing on the agency brief as a platitude –– this about actual demonstration that an agency is interested in how it’s outputs are influencing the performance of your business in terms of campaign design and a level of performance related remuneration.
for me – this whole event is an important line in the sand – We now have robust Irish data on the importance of great creative ideas and importance of share of voice in determining market share.
I’d like to see more initiatives like this where the agenda is about driving the overall value of marketing and advertising with our stakeholders in the Boardroom. I look forward to a lively discussion with my fellow panelists and to hopefully the emergence of more ideas and actions coming from the sector to showcase the importance of Marketing and advertising to the delivery of business results.
