More metric madness.

On the 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 performance.” Performance today, says Zephrin, is a cultural imperative, woven into every day life. Accordingly, he asks:

“Why should it be different in the world of online advertising? Why can’t our executive teams and clients expect better performance from our branding campaigns? Why should branding campaigns be insulated from the demand for better performance and higher ROI?”

This is where we get distracted and off-track with the whole advertising accountability question, particularly as it regards brands.

For starters, who says that branding campaigns are insulated from performance and ROI?  Brand campaigns are not launched into the advertising ether without goals and objectives, and there are plenty of tools with which to measure performance against those objectives.

But consider also:

Brands are a collection of promises: quality promises, service promises and price promises. If a brand promises one thing and delivers another, the brand suffers and the customer suffers. This is the primary performance burden of brands. And, to Zephrin’s point, they carry that burden with them to work every day.

The burden of brand advertising is to remind customers of brand promises. To do this, most brands – especially big brands – have to reach many people, perhaps millions. Take Tide detergent, for instance: I heard once that Tide sells about 500,000,000 units of its product(s) each year in order to fulfill it’s promises.  At an average action rate of, say, .006 if Tide’s sales depended exclusively on the sort of direct action implied by performance advertising advocates the online world would have to come up with slightly over 8 trillion ad impressions. Maybe less, considering that 12% – 15% of Tide’s customers account for most of their sales. Regardless, long before we reached those levels of exposure customers would be dumping Tide out the windows. More advertising is not the answer for brands.

I own an Acura TL. Before I owned an Acrua TL I was mostly unconscious of other TLs on the highway. Driving the TL home from the dealer the first day, and as I have driven every day since, I am amazed at how many people drive TLs. This is something brand marketers understand. It is the same thing with brand advertising. Before the TL, I saw no TL advertising. Since the TL, I see it all. This is branding. I have 56,000 miles on my car and I plan to make it last another 100,000, or three to five years. All the car buyer opportunities in the world don’t add up to all the car owner opportunities in the world, but there will be very little performance in the advertising that washes over me from Acura until, maybe, 2012.  Is their money insulated from the demand for performance?

No. Measured in units of one-thousand (CPMs), brand advertising is wonderfully efficient way to reach customers, over time, with a reminder of brand promises and smart choices. Nothing is best left to the last minute, as my father used to try and teach me. We’re not going back to the store to get Tide for weeks. We’re not buying another car for years. If marketers save advertising for those last possible - in-market - moments so as to try and connect the financial dots more securely they are only insulating themselves from reality.