“Half my advertising spend is wasted; the trouble is, I don’t know which half.”
The quote that is frequently attributed to either John Wanamaker, a retail magnate in the United States, or Lord Leverhulme, a British industrialist amongst others.
Nonetheless, the quote has become a parable for the uncertainty surrounding the effectiveness (or lack thereof) of advertising. When you Google the phrase “half my advertising is wasted” you get ~20 million results, demonstrating that this “waste” is vividly real even in the age of all things Internet.
When the quote is read aloud at an industry event, half the audience groans and the other half nervously giggles. It’s unclear if this reaction stems from a belief that the 50% figure is ridiculously low or ridiculously high. What does appear to be acknowledged is the belief that advertising is an unaccountable cost of doing business. Now in an era that values increased value for shareholders, being unaccountable is not a great place to be.
Fast forward a century, why are we still struggling with the same question?
Today, Artificial intelligence (AI) is empowering the world around us. It has touched every industry and marketing is no mis-nomer. AI has enabled us to rethink how we integrate information, analyze data, and use the resulting insights to improve decision making.
Marketing once considered as muddy, obscure, disconnected and unmeasurable, now can be tracked, measured in a clean and transparent way with the help of AI.
In today’s world, Problem is not about doing but about knowing.
Lord Kelvin, a scottish-Irish physicist, once said “If you can’t measure you can’t improve”. When we measure what we speak, and express it in numbers, we know something about it; but when we cannot measure and express it in numbers, our knowledge is of a meager and unsatisfactory kind.
So, let’s find out the challenges that brands are facing in measuring marketing right.
Measurement Model:
Most of the time, the root cause of not measuring your campaign right is not the lack of creativity or media channels you use. It is not even about the people and teamwork. It is mostly the lack of process and structured thinking about what the objective of that campaign is all about and setting the right objective / goal of each campaign and media and most importantly creating a document around it.
Generally, a campaign starts with creation of a campaign strategy followed by media planning and then execution and measurement comes as an afterthought. What really gets missed here is a detailed measurement plan right in between the media planning and execution stage.
Here is a full 5 steps measurement model that includes the following steps:
- Identify the business objectives upfront and set the broadest parameters for the work
- Identify crisp goals for each business objective.
- Write down the key performance indicators.
- Set the parameters for success upfront by identifying targets for each KPI.
- Identify the segments of people / behaviour / outcomes that will be analysed
- Data
Advent of digital marketing has led to an influx of huge data points for marketing. Today Google, Meta and other platforms are generating huge amounts of data at a much rapid pace. Sensible combining of these data points with traditional offline media i.e. TV, Radio, OOH etc can unearth huge insights for campaigns. Brands and agencies are creating big technological stacks via data lakes / data warehouses to store these data points. Data is being fetched from digital APIs while for offline media, data is being updated in offline mode to create a 360 degree campaign view to generate relevant information.
Right talent:
Today, brand marketing measurement professionals are in great demand because of their niche skills. It needs confluence of multiple skills
Statistics: “Mathematics is not about numbers, equations, algorithms or computations. It is about understanding”. Right from the strategy to planning to evaluation stage, numbers are being talked about. Some of these numbers are factual and some are probabilistic and this is where we need people with good statistical skills.
Artificial intelligence / machine learning: Today brands have a massive amount of digital and offline media data at their disposal. Deciphering these data points and getting actionable insights require not only massive computation but also advanced algorithms.
At the very basic, marketing works on causal inferences i.e. cause and effect. Marketing moves the needle by innovation / creating causes leading to visible business effects / signals.
Right from running an A/B test to identifying look-alike audiences to understanding the incrementality of each media and many more, these algorithms play a major role in answering each of these questions.
Media and marketing knowledge: At the end measurement is not about just running models, it is also about marrying your mathematical output with business understanding. This is where 95% of people fail as most of the people are learning technical skills but they gain business skills only with experience and good mentors.
Through machine learning, multiple models/ equations are being generated. Identifying the right algorithm requires proper business knowledge and understanding.
At SYNC, we have created a unified solution SYNC measurement operating system (MOS) for above mentioned challenges. It uses state-of-the-art algorithms to solve every business problem that currently brands are facing.
So next time if you have any challenges in marketing, please get in touch with us.
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