Thanks. Brand experience is elusive, but we’re getting much better at measuring it. The agency I currently work for, ZenithOptimedia, has a great Touchpoints program that does a good job of evaluating brand experience (alas, not in real time). It’s extremely useful and correlates 80% or better with market share.

Thanks for your comment.

- Greg

- Greg

Nice post (No surprise there, everybody from Philadelphia writes great posts:-)

The Ad Contrarian ( http://adcontrarian.blogspot.com/ ) is a a truly great read. Although, I must admit, I do find some of his ideas a bit goofy and recently got into a small comment battle on the TAC site. Nevertheless, he’s usually right and, more importantly, always funny

- Greg

BTW, I’m a big TAC fan, too! http://tinyurl.com/3x9o8h5

All the best,
Steve O

Thanks for your input (although I think the consultants racked up considerably more millions than the agencies).

In truth, most of the major marketers do have a fairly sophisticated understanding about ROI. They track and monitor performance on a number of axes, invest in econometrics to optimize them, etc.

The bigger problem is with smaller advertisers who do not have a research budget. For them, DR offers the only real measurement that is meaningful to them and they mistake that for meaning that it is the only marketing channel that produces measurable results.

- Greg

Digital media lends itself to easy direct response measurement, and the bean counters – whether on Wall Street or in your internal accounting and budgeting groups – love measurement

So as budgets have tightened up and marketers have been (rightly) asked to demonstrate ROI on their ad investments, digital/DR has become the path of least resistance

I think the failure here is one shared by agencies, media companies and marketers alike

Having spent years railing against ROI models, media companies now find themselves fighting a rear-guard action against websites that actively track response levels and dynamically price inventory.

Marketers have fallen prey to the myth of complexity – convinced the costs of tracking response outweigh the value to be gained from optimization.

Agencies and consultants have made countless millions in fees alternatively offering solutions and obscuring results.

Instead of resisting actionable ROI measures, the ad community should be leading the charge to develop sustainable, dynamic and robust models to guide future investments.

Yeah, I think that’s about right. It all comes down to objectives. It is very rare that DM isn’t at least part of the picture and very rare that it is the whole picture.

I think the key, for DM or for anything else, is to know as much about your client’s business as possible so that you can act as a true partner and not just a one dimensional advocate for whatever it is you’re selling.

- Greg

Personally I think you first have to put aside certain categories of products. Hard-core infomercial-like products (basically product invented from scratch to be sold via DM) is most likely not going to benefit from an awareness approach. The calculation is always ordervalue-mediacost needs to be positive. Those operations would go bankrupt if they tired to market based on traditional brand-awareness model. And your comment that “In truth, there is a lot more to a purchase than simply seeing an offer and responding to it” is simply not true for many DM-sold product. The consumer may see multiple mail pieces or infomercials but “Girls Gone Wild” video franchise for example did just find with “see and offer and respond” as do many infomercial products. I just had to order a Pillow Pet for my daughter because of an infomercial.

But DMer forget that there are also plenty of products that DO require an emotion-based path do purchase as you outline. There are products like Apple’s where they do pretty well without much DM. I actually don’t recall ever getting mail from Apple. Beer, soda and retail are all areas where part of the “product” IS the TV branding — the emotional association of certain beer is derived in part by the branding the buyer wants to be associated with (and knows others know about). So the TV spend is actually part of the product itself.

I wish “we could all just get along” and DMers could listen and learn from brand guys and visa versa. You learn a lot when you start by acknowledging that both are important. The key is understanding when to use each and how.