ANA Marketing Maestros

The 2009 ANA/MMA Marketing Accountability Survey

Key findings from the ANA/MMA Marketing Accountability Survey presented by Barbara Bacci Mirque.

Leverage Your Data

By Barbara Bacci Mirque

At the ANA I have the good fortune to see lots of data and hear from many different client side marketers.  I personally have worked on five ANA marketing accountability surveys (and about to start the sixth one) and on our seminal MME 2010 cross industry study fielded in partnership with the AAAA, IAB and Booz & Co.  Recently I was privy to a report from a recent digital study.  The same issues keep surfacing:  it is not just about measurement be it digital or analog-it is also about how data is collected and categorized in an organization and how internal silos are broken down. What digital has added into the discussion is the ability to measure more and  more–some in minutia-and the need to wade through and discern what is relevant and what is not. 

Today organizations can gather reams of data but if marketing needs are not considered the data will be difficult for marketers to utilize.  Leveraging data is a key challenge faced by many organizations and marketing is sometimes left out of these discussions.  Marketers must  talk to Finance and to the Analytics staff and work as a team on this task to stop this cycle.  There should be a centralized database which  all users access and into which marketers input data from their powerpoint oriented marketing plans. It sounds simple but putting together such a database is an enormous undertaking.   However, it should be a starting point that will reap many rewards, the least of which may be measuring the return on marketing investments.

Marketing Accountability Programs – More Important Than Ever

By: Barbara Bacci Mirque

We have all heard the credo – those who increase share of voice in a down economy when others are cutting theirs – reap long term benefits. We have the case studies to verify that.  At the ANA we believe wholeheartedly that marketing leads to superior financial performance and is a growth driver for the firm.   But what do you do when your boss comes into your office and says we either have to cut staff or cut the marketing budget?  How are you going to make the right choices that will have minimal impact on your business? 

If you have a marketing accountability program in place, those decisions will not be as difficult. In the six years that the ANA has been studying this issue, there has been a marked increase in marketing accountability tools and processes.The ANA has documented best practices that marketers can undertake to begin an accountability effort. 

• First and foremost, work with a cross functional team that includes finance, so there is broad based input and ownership. 
• Be sure your CEO is a champion of your efforts – my guess is that this could be the year to gain that sponsorship if it has been lacking in the past! 
• Align your brand metrics with the strategic and financial metrics of senior management.
• Identify required and available data sources and review data gaps and issues to develop solutions and if needed, work around strategies. 

A well structured marketing accountability program can enable marketers to back up their gut instincts with fact and add rigor to the marketing department.  To learn more about how to start or improve marketing accountability in your organization, ANA members can access the ANA Marketing Insights Center resources at http://www.ana.net/michome2/micktshow/10.  Non members can read the top line report from our sixth annual ANA/MMA Marketing Accountability Survey at the ANA website at http://www.ana.net/news/content/1282.

Driving Marketing Effectiveness Forward

By: Michael Palmer

ANA offers its members a unique opportunity – to benchmark six of its marketing processes (btw this service is free to ANA members) including:

1. Overall Process Linkage
2. Insights and Marketing Knowledge
3. Marketing Strategy
4. Annual Marketing Planning
5. Integrated Marketing
6. Marketing Measurements (Metrics)

What we have discovered is most interesting.  The two areas that have bubbled to the surface as those where marketers are having the most difficulty (regardless of whether they are B2Bor B2C) - Insights and Marketing Knowledge and Integrated Marketing.  Marketing organizations are horrible about collecting data and turning that data into insightful action – then sharing those incredibly valuable insights internally to drive revenue growth.  Integrated marketing is something we marketers talk about incessantly, but do little about.  This is the area where we have the paltriest of results.

What’s the problem?  First, a consistent weakness is an inadequate marketing library from which success models and critical marketing documents may be easily shared globally. Most companies seem to have a poorly maintained repository of aging and increasingly irrelevant documents which are largely ignored by the employee base.  So the information is collected but no one is using it effectively.  Not very smart when we know that marketing insights drive everything we marketers should be doing.

Secondly, most companies lack anything meeting the definition of a process in the areas of insight development, brand equity building and integrated marketing campaign assembly. Marketers seem to employ an ad hoc approach whose output depends upon the individual brilliance (or luck) of a team leader rather than an embedded, reproducible corporate competence.

And we marketers expect the rest of the company to respect us as business leaders? 

If you are an ANA member company why wouldn’t you want to measure your effectiveness in the six key processes listed above, the fact that you can learn where and how you could increase your marketing effectiveness and thereby increase your marketing leadership would seem most valuable – if this is the case, just send me an email (mpalmer@ana.net) and I’ll hook you up. For those not ANA members who wish to find out where/how you can improve – email me as well and we’ll talk membership.

ANA Accountability Study: Marketing, Finance Not on Same Metrics Page

By Barbara Bacci Mirque

You have probably heard about the ANA’s fourth annual marketing accountability survey, written in conjunction with MMA and fielded on our behalf by Guideline Inc.

This survey was previewed at the ANA’s Marketing Accountability Conference in September 2007. The buzz around the conference was the stark finding that marketing accountability efforts had backslided in the past year. As we discussed these findings at the conference and later at the ANA’s marketing accountability committee, a few things came to light about why satisfaction levels with respondents’ marketing accountability efforts had plummeted versus previous years.

Marketing accountability is hard and requires a culture shift and a commitment to expend both human and financial resources. Also, after a few years working on this, the low hanging fruit – the easier to do tasks – have been plucked. Now the hard work is in front of many companies and that takes a senior level commitment that our survey found was lacking. Another realization was that many of the marketing accountability efforts were spearheaded by the marketing department without cross functional support – in only a little over one third (37%) of the companies surveyed was there a cross functional marketing accountability team (20%) or a team composed of marketing and finance (17%). Without the buy in of finance, marketing accountability efforts are most likely doomed.

An ANA best practice recommends these structures. ANA members can download the results here. We are about to launch the 5th Annual ANA Marketing Accountability survey. Join us at our July Marketing Accountability Conference in Laguna Nigel to learn more about this important topic. ANA members can also join the ANA’s Marketing Accountability Committee.

Profitable Marketing Communications

by Mark Fogelberg

I read too much. Luckily for me, after stumbling through some recent D-grade business books, I came upon an A+.

Antony Young, the President of Optimedia in the US, and Lucy Aitken, marketing and media writer, created a perfect tome for today's ever present marketing ROI environment.

I found myself dog-earing dozens of pages of this book. Many were based upon 8 investor tips. When I write "investor tips" it's because the authors describe  marketing as a form of loan from a company. How marketers invest (rather than spend) should be weighed against other investment options a company (or brand) might evaluate. You know, it's the I in ROI.

The eight investor tips to profitable marketing communications:

1. Concentrate on outcomes, not outputs
2. Forget consumers, target customers
3. Manage your communication investment portfolio
4. Differentiate any way you can
5. Engagement and experience are the new 30-second ads
6. Apply a focus investing approach
7. Establish a measurement culture
8. Leverage your employee capital

Yes, you might have seen some of these before. But the tips have chapters dedicated to each and within each chapter are more insights and nuggets.

With international cases and examples combined with actionable strategies, this book deserves a place on every marketer's bookshelf. And any agency exec that doesn't digest this book and put ideas to work should dread a premature retirement as they allow their agency to drift into irrelevancy.

Marketing Accountability is Still Elusive

By Barbara Bacci Mirque

The results from our Annual Marketing Accountability Survey were recently revealed at the 2007 Marketing Accountability Conference. This survey was conducted in conjunction with MMA and fielded by our friends at Guideline Inc.

The conference buzzed after learning that the survey results indicated that rather than marketers progressing in their marketing accountability efforts, it appeared they are backsliding. I took part in many discussions about this phenomenon and a few theories were advanced. The most compelling: the bar is being raised. 

In the past, as we all embarked on our respective marketing accountability journeys, we did not know what we did not know!  Now as we are more enlightened, we realize that we aren’t as successful as we thought we were.

Also, we have tackled the low hanging fruit and now are dealing with the more difficult aspects of marketing accountability such as instituting repeatable, sustainable marketing process and organizational changes which are difficult to implement on a good day. Even finance is becoming more sophisticated about marketing accountability and is challenging us more than they have in the past.  We may have erred in not including their input into the assumptions that we put into our marketing models and now they are questioning if models were built upon faulty assumptions.  All the more reason to keep talking to each other and discussing best marketing accountability practices. We invite ANA members to join the Marketing Accountability Committee to keep the conversations going. 

For more details about the Marketing Accountability Survey results, ANA members can visit the new face of the Marketing Insights Center. Also, I was recently interviewed about the survey by Adweek for their online magazine, click here to read the story.

Technorati tags: marketing accountability , marketing

Integrated Marketing Promo Video

Click to watch the video

Thanks to Yahoo! for putting together this video montage from our Integrated Marketing Conference.

ANA/Guideline Brand Deterioration Study

                                                  

By Kaitlin Villanova

The ANA recently surveyed a random sample of ANA members who are part of the ANA's Brand Leadership Panel  - managed by Guideline Inc. - about brand deterioration. The survey was initiated by the ANA Brand Management Commitee and led by Committee Chair Rodger Adams, SVP and CMO of The Home Depot.

Interestingly enough, roughly 68 percent of companies surveyed indicated their company has been marketing its brand for more than 25 years. Nine percent for 15 to 25 years, 14 percent 5 to 15 years and only 8 percent of companies have been marketing its brand for 5 years or less. With so many veteran brands in the marketplace, more than half felt that despite the age of the brand, they are still well established and strong.

David Ogilvy reminds us that brand equity is defined as "the consumer's idea of a product." As simple as this definition is, measuring this is challenging. There are numerous approaches to measuring brand equity, and they generally fall into two categories:

• Research-based brand equity evaluations - measures buyer behavior and attitudes and how they impact the economic performance of a brand.
• Financially driven approaches - measures that consider the aggregate of historic costs incurred or replacement cost required to bring the brand to its current state.

Brand deterioration has been talked about, written about, and worried about for the past decade. The perception of a companys' brand equity has become integral to its perceived value, stature and success.

To learn more on the subject, check out Brand Deterioration: How to Identify, Measure and Respond or you can register for a complimentary Guideline Webinar on Wednesday June 6.

Technorati tags: brand equity marketing brand deterioration

Why Media Efficiencies are Needed

By Barbara Bacci Mirque

The ANA is a proponent of the need to impose efficiency to the entire marketing supply chain. As such, we sit on the eBay Media Marketplace (still in beta) steering committee. As I am sure you all have heard, the eBay Media Marketplace is a media exchange designed by advertisers and their agencies in conjunction with eBay.

That is a fundamental difference from all of the other media marketplaces – this one was driven by the demand side! The eBay Media Marketplace as currently designed, is comprised of a “reverse auction” which automates a fragmented and in some cases maybe even a biased RFP (Request for Proposal) process. The marketplace allows advertisers and their agencies to level the playing field and invite in all relevant parties with the flick of their wrist when they issue RFPs. It also provides a very important trail on the bid process itself– a trail in which our SOX compliant finance and purchasing departments are very interested. Recently the eBay Media Marketplace steering committee invited cable sellers to beta test the system and tell us what they thought.

We chose to start the pilot with the cable side as they have traditionally tended to be a very progressive medium. We are very disappointed with their decision - announced today - not to participate in the eBay Media Marketplace. This is a very active time for this, as evidenced by recent announcements by DoubleClick and Google. It is apparent that portions of the media buying process are going to evolve into some form of an exchange selling format. We think it is important that advertisers, their agencies and the media sellers work jointly to develop a system that works for all parties – as the eBay Media Marketplace was intended. Adweek talks about it here.

We invite any interested parties to contact us as we move forward on this important media marketplace.

Technorati tags: eBay media marketplace