The Road to Marketing Accountability

Marketing accountability is one of the most important subjects we have in front of us at the ANA – and for very good reasons. Too often, the marketing industry had been blistered by criticism of our inability to connect "the cause" with "the effect." Often, marketers had to struggle and guess at the results of well thought out marketing and advertising campaigns. Trying to understand the impact on brands was even harder to assess.

I am very pleased that the industry has taken the message to heart. Perhaps reacting to impatient CEO's, the industry has been hard at work to bring more measurements and common sense to this arena. Efforts have sprung up in most companies to enhance the level of marketing quantification and valuation. Some companies are well ahead of others – but, importantly, we feel that the movement is gaining important traction – traction that we will continue to fuel at our upcoming "Masters of Marketing" conference – ANA’s Annual Conference – on October 7-10.

We believe so much in this subject that we, at the ANA, will be raising the marketing accountability "bar" at every opportunity. We applaud the work of our comrades at the Radio Advertising Bureau, the Advertising Research Foundation, the Interactive Advertising Bureau and others for their efforts to help the industry raise that bar. For ANA’s part, marketing accountability is one of the leading subjects at our marketing and media committee meetings, it is reflected in our increased survey work with members, and it is the subject of a dedicated conference that the ANA kicked off this year – The Marketing Accountability Forum. At that meeting, Peter Sealey – the CEO of the Los Altos Group and the host for the meeting – brought increased attention to one of the most important innovations to enhance marketing accountability – Ad-ID.

For those unfamiliar with Ad-ID, the quick answer is that it represents the industry's "UPC Code" for digitally tagging and tracking every advertising and marketing asset a company may have – be it television, radio, internet, packaging or print. Created jointly by the 4A’s and the ANA, the rollout of Ad-ID is well underway – currently being used by more than 100 companies – a list that is growing very quickly. By providing a central coding system that is embraced and recognized by all in the media, agency and marketing communities, the opportunities for substantially enhancing productivity are endless. One such opportunity we are very excited about is the integration of Ad-ID with the upcoming rollout of electronic data interchange (EDI). Just think of the enormous productivity that will be generated by the media ordering and invoicing system. Just think about the end of incorrect advertising placements and screw-ups in the billing process. Just think of having the ability to verify what commercial truly ran. Just think about the opportunity to take your media asset and target it more directly to a particular audience segment or geography – and being able to measure its impact. Those dreams are becoming reality. Just recently, the major TV networks (ABC, CBS, NBC, FOX) have become Ad-ID compliant – enhancing the industry’s ability to realize increasing productivity over time.

We really are making strides to guessing less and measuring more. We, as an industry, have a long way to go. But we are on the right track – and we are beginning to make considerable progress. The fun aspect is that we are not far off from making a real dent into understanding the answer to the age old John Wannamaker question "Which half of my advertising is wasted?"

Comments

[Ed O'Meara]

Anyone besides me try to connect with a live person at Ad-ID? The site is very sparse, and there are no contact names listed. The Live Chat has no one responding.

Are there any actual suppliers or agencies or advertisers using this concept outside of TV tracking?

[David Polinchock]

Isn't marketing accountability already tracked? I think it's called sales, growth, market share or any other phrases like this. Maybe it’s a mistake to try and add accountability to every single marketing effort. That could simply inspire copy-cat advertising or companies simply doing the same thing over and over again. For example, I’ve never heard BMW indicate that there was a direct correlation between the BMW film series and sales, except that sales were way up after those movies appeared. But, they might not have been able to track a sale directly back to someone watching one of the films.

In a recent blog, you also wrote “But marketing is increasingly disconnected from the CEO agenda with top line growth (52%) being the primary focus for CEOs and marketing efforts focused more on tactical issues such as setting and maintaining branding guidelines (83%).” Perhaps if marketing ROI was aimed more at top line growth, it would garner the attention of the CEO in a more direct manner and put marketing where it belongs, as a core tool to drive business.

David