Tuesday, August 08, 2006
Wasted Advertising
New Book Reports 37% of All Advertising is Wasted
I look forward to reading the book "What Sticks," to be released next month. Among its findings: 37.3% of advertising is wasted. What's interesting, according to the Ad Age report, linked above, is that the authors tend to lay the reason for that waste on marketers and "their failure to even define success for campaigns at the outset -- much less measure it properly on the back end."
Grab:
The authors cite fear of failure -- and firing -- as possibly the biggest problem for marketers seeking to improve ROI. The core of the book is a description of and entreaty for a "commercial optimization process" covering messaging strategy, creative and media planning -- a sort of Six Sigma for marketing. But like any continuous improvement program, it requires analysis of failure, which has become almost impossible for some to admit for fear they'll be fired.
As a biased media person who makes his living mostly from the sale of advertising, I've seen a lot of reasons for advertising waste: conservatism ("we buy where our competition buys"), fear ("we never support new projects, come back to us when you've got a couple issues under your belt"), dependence on raw numbers ("your competition has more circulation, they must be better") and more.
But the thing that's bothered me the most has been the propensity of many marketers to not measure the success of their buys, or to even follow up properly on the leads they generate. When my company was working with Richmond Events, which delivers a very unique business proposition--one-on-one prescheduled meetings with extremely senior decision makers--we found that the most common complaint among these decision makers was the lack of followup from the vendors they met with. We developed training and followup procedures to help our vendors help themselves--and more importantly, to make sure that the decision makers who attended the event got the value they wanted.
For one of our current clients, we sold an extremely large advertising/sponsorship package which is wrapped around benchmark research to help the client measure the impact of the investment. I think we'll renew that business for next year.
I think b2b media can build a competitive advantage by creating more proactive tools to help our advertisers/exhibitors measure the success of their campaigns. We publishers used to tell our salespeople, 'the ad isn't truly sold until we get paid.' We need to change that to sommthing like this: 'The ad isn't sold until the client understands its ROI.'
P.S. There will always be waste in advertising. Sadly, customers don't always congregate in the same place with their attention focused on a given marketing message. The key, as I've mentioned before, is to use as many tools as possible to reach as many potential buyers as possible to move them toward a decision for your product or service.
Comments
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I look forward to reading the book "What Sticks," to be released next month. Among its findings: 37.3% of advertising is wasted. What's interesting, according to the Ad Age report, linked above, is that the authors tend to lay the reason for that waste on marketers and "their failure to even define success for campaigns at the outset -- much less measure it properly on the back end."
Grab:
The authors cite fear of failure -- and firing -- as possibly the biggest problem for marketers seeking to improve ROI. The core of the book is a description of and entreaty for a "commercial optimization process" covering messaging strategy, creative and media planning -- a sort of Six Sigma for marketing. But like any continuous improvement program, it requires analysis of failure, which has become almost impossible for some to admit for fear they'll be fired.
As a biased media person who makes his living mostly from the sale of advertising, I've seen a lot of reasons for advertising waste: conservatism ("we buy where our competition buys"), fear ("we never support new projects, come back to us when you've got a couple issues under your belt"), dependence on raw numbers ("your competition has more circulation, they must be better") and more.
But the thing that's bothered me the most has been the propensity of many marketers to not measure the success of their buys, or to even follow up properly on the leads they generate. When my company was working with Richmond Events, which delivers a very unique business proposition--one-on-one prescheduled meetings with extremely senior decision makers--we found that the most common complaint among these decision makers was the lack of followup from the vendors they met with. We developed training and followup procedures to help our vendors help themselves--and more importantly, to make sure that the decision makers who attended the event got the value they wanted.
For one of our current clients, we sold an extremely large advertising/sponsorship package which is wrapped around benchmark research to help the client measure the impact of the investment. I think we'll renew that business for next year.
I think b2b media can build a competitive advantage by creating more proactive tools to help our advertisers/exhibitors measure the success of their campaigns. We publishers used to tell our salespeople, 'the ad isn't truly sold until we get paid.' We need to change that to sommthing like this: 'The ad isn't sold until the client understands its ROI.'
P.S. There will always be waste in advertising. Sadly, customers don't always congregate in the same place with their attention focused on a given marketing message. The key, as I've mentioned before, is to use as many tools as possible to reach as many potential buyers as possible to move them toward a decision for your product or service.
