Two articles caught my eye earlier this week.
One was an AdAge article entitled “So Much for Engagement; Buys Are Still Based on Eyes”. It talked about a recent study by Advertiser Perceptions. Marketers and media buyers are looking to spend more and more dollars online. That’s because their first and foremost metric is reach – and that’s were people are going today. Online. But they see it more as a results oriented medium and are not doing it for engagement purposes as they don’t perceive that the online is good for engagement. This study was based on a survey of 2047 marketers and their media buyers.
The second one was a press release of a report put out by the Chief Marketing Officer (CMO) Council. It described how measurable ROI is becoming an increasingly important factor for marketers as they transform dollars online. Accountabilty is of prime importance as marketers look to measure the value of the programs they’ve created and the investments they’ve made. A result of this trend in 2007 was the relative high turnover of the agencies used – ad, web design, and PR – to carry out these programs. The reasons for the severing of relationships was often tied into “lack of innovation” and “no value-added thinking”. Hmm…
ROI is often hard to prove in social media marketing. While most forms of marketing involve some sort of relationship building, social media marketing is almost completely based upon it. It’s effectiveness is not measured in short term or fixed period metrics – the heart of ROI, but long-term difficult-to-measure attributes related to brand affinity and customer lifetime value. It’s all qualitative analysis and not quantitative analysis.
If it’s true that companies are going to be spending more and more online with a greater focus on sustaining measurable ROI, then it doesn’t bode well for social media types if we have a recession that many are predicting.
Francois Gossieaux, in Emergence Marketing, makes an excellent point in refuting the heavy emphasis on ROI in marketing, period.
“by measuring ROI on discreet processes (i.e., a specific lead generation campaign), which most companies who measure ROI do, companies are reducing marketing to a collection of simple linear processes, when in reality it is a complex multi-variable and non-linear system. So by oversimplifying marketing to make it measurable, many companies will actually break marketing more so than it already is.”
Marketers have often complained – justifiably so in my opinion – of how marketing is often devalued within their organization. It can be viewed as a cost as opposed to an investment. The push for ROI to justify spend means that they could choose strategies and tactics that 1) they are most familiar with and 2) are the most measurable.
An amazing paragraph from the AdAge article reads:
So which medium is the most engaging? Survey respondents said it’s print — yet ranked print lowest for delivering results. Online was ranked lowest for engagement but highest for results, while TV was ranked in the middle for both results and engagement.
Let’s check this out…marketers are increasing their online spend because that’s where the people are. Online is the most interactive medium and by extension of that should be the best for engagement but marketers (and probably ad agencies) see it as the worst. Marketers now see it as being the best for results (the “R” in ROI) along with perhaps reach. This would seemingly say that they don’t yet value the various aspects of social media marketing.
And not only that, but print, the medium that’s both losing its share of ad spend and is considered to be the worst for results is considered to be the best for engagement by these very same marketers. WTF?
It’s no secret that many traditional marketers and media buyers see the online arena through their traditionalist eyes. We see evidence of that all the time. Facebook’s Beacon and Social Ads are recent examples of that. Fake attempts to tie into word of mouth. Facebook is hot. Lots of eyeballs lets do it. We’ll be hip and it’s “pushing the envelope”. It’s likely traditional types are trying to please whomever they answer to.
Mack Collier pointed out how in a conversation we had from his post “Companies Remain in the Shadow of the Blogosphere”:
“but I think many companies and their PR firms still see most blogs as having an audience of about 4 people, all family members of the author. I think that’s why you are seeing them treat the highly-trafficked blogs, the Tech Crunchs, as media sources. But for 99% of blogs, they don’t care and don’t understand why they should.”
He’s right. And that’s unfortunate. But the odd thing is that the key decision makers – marketing executives – are likely in their eternal search for ROI are hurting their efforsts for long term success by view the online arena as ineffective for engagement. And then by either choosing traditional minded ad agencies (and then complaining that they lack innovation) or by stifling the creativity of less traditional and more innovative agencies (by an unnecessary focus on immediate ROI) they are shooting themselves in BOTH feet.
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