I was interested to learn today in his Commentary piece for AdAge (“Metric Madness”) that Al Ries, brand positioning strategist, was a math major in college. He uses that as a bit of leverage to support his argument that the issues of metrics and numbers and ROI have run amuck with business, generally, and with advertising in particular. Says Mr. Ries:
“Almost everything about marketing is the opposite of the typical manager’s approach to running a business. Marketing is illogical and definitely not analytical. Marketing is intuitive and holistic.
We’re concerned, however, that this message is being ignored by the marketing community, who seem to be drifting from the right to the left — from a right-brain approach to a left-brain approach.”
Quite.
No where is this drift more pernicious than online, which claimed ROI as its value proposition and has struggled ever since to prove its case in a way that is truly differentiated and successful at attracting a competitive share of ad spending. On balance, the only unique ROI selling point online has been price and, specifically, pay-for-performance – which we’ve heard many times through this recession.
Not that Internet doesn’t offer a more accountable media experience: Let’s just start with measuring the size of an audience, which, offline, is surmised by sample and audit reports and online can be counted impression by impression. But as a value proposition ROI fails online because it is not a sufficient explanation – it is no explanation at all - for why people use the Internet. Value propositions are customer centric and customer driven. Advertising ROI is not customer driven. Thus it cannot be the reason to advertise online.
Connecting with customers has to be the reason to advertise online, as it has to be the reason to advertise anywhere. As a customer, however, I can report that establishing those connections is hard. For one thing, if you asked me today, I’d never buy another Wolf stove (owned by SubZero) for my house. But tomorrow someone could stop by and say, “I hear those are the best stoves on the market,” to which I might just then agree.
It’s complicated and sometimes, as Ries says, not very logical. That’s why it’s hard.
May 6, 2009 at 11:04 pm |
[...] heels of Al Ries’s ”Metric Madness” commentary in Ad Age yesterday (see previous post), comes this from Zephrin Lasker in the online trade, Adotas: “Online branding in the age of [...]