ANA Marketing Maestros

The Digital Agency Compensation Paradox

By Barbara Bacci Mirque

One of the paradoxes that marketers are currently grappling with is that in many circumstances the production costs of digital media exceeds that of the media costs. And since production is something for which agencies need to be compensated, digital agency compensation costs are rising. What I have heard some senior marketers say is that their bosses don’t understand this situation since digital media was initially touted as being more efficient than traditional media. Some of this can be attributed to inefficient processes that currently exist in the digital media ecosystem which the IAB and AAAA, with support of the ANA, are working on. To help our members benchmark digital agency compensation, the ANA recently fielded a survey on this topic. Mary Conrad of Jones, Lundin, Beals was nice enough to be our subject matter expert and interpret the survey findings. The initial results reflect this contradiction. 

The good news is that digital budgets are increasing despite economic stress.  But along with that, the number of digital agencies being utilized is also increasing as services proliferate.  The bad news for marketers is that the expanding roster of digital agencies means more complex agency management issues and higher agency compensation fees.  The bottom line is that on a percentage basis digital agencies command a higher percentage of the marketing budget than traditional agencies.  As we obtain more survey respondents, we will be delving into and releasing these findings in the coming months.   A preliminary report will be issued at the ANA Advertising Financial Management Conference beginning Sunday April 19 in

Phoenix

.  

 

If you are a client side marketer and would like to take the survey, contact Lindsey Raczka at [email protected].

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.

Let's Get Digital

By Barbara Bacci Mirque

I recently attended Shelly Palmer’s Get Digital seminar (http://tinyurl.com/crfhsr.)  (I am now so digital I figured out how to create a tiny url instead of having to rely on Irina Skaya to create hot links for me!) I have known Shelly for a few years since our work together on interactive television so I was intrigued by his fast track class to becoming a digitally savvy marketer.   

As many of you know from ANA’s MME 2010 study fielded in collaboration with the AAAA, IAB and Booz & Co., most marketers know they need to be digitally savvy. They also realize that they are not.  So classes such as this one which are about building personal skillsets, or the ANA’s own digital marketing class which teaches you how to market digitally, are sure fire ways to jump on the digital bandwagon.  Or as one of my classmates so succinctly stated, after attending the class at least he now knows what he doesn’t know! 

So here is a crash course on how to build your own digital skillsets: Join Facebook and post photos to it and write on your friends’ walls, join LinkedIn, write a blog, create a personal website, start using Twitter, study Google apps, buy a really good PC or Mac, use a PDA, purchase a URL of your own name, and learn how to back up your files.  If you aren’t engaging in these activities yourself, how can you determine the best way to market to your consumers – many of whom are?  You can also read some great case studies from digitally aware marketers in the ANA’s Marketing Insights Center. I know I have forgotten half of what I learned so if you are a digital novice then be sure you have some young marketers on your staff to reverse mentor you.  Now I have to sign off and go find Irina to explain how to create those hot links again!

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.

Innovation in Today's New Media World

by Barbara Bacci Mirque

In the Web 2.0 world we inhabit today, all of the paradigms are shifting.  Advertisers are becoming content providers.  Agency models are in flux. Media is the new creative.  There are hundreds of television channels, and microsites, webinars, social networking and podcasts are supplementing the traditional media channels I grew up with in my marketing career. 

In our Marketing Media Ecosystem 2010 study, conducted with the AAAA, IAB and Booz & Co.
across all of our respective  memberships, our research results demonstrated the need for all of the various constituencies to become more agile and flexible as they transform their business models.  This is because the landscape is at an inflection point - online is no longer experimental; there is massive audience fragmentation providing more choice for consumers but also for advertisers; search and ad networks are key growth drivers; media segments are blending. 

Thus, it is an exciting time to be a marketer but also a complex one.  Marketing accountability used to be the number one issue that kept up our senior marketers at night but that has been supplanted by the challenges posed in integrating new media with traditional media.  Recently I had a blast talking about this very topic with Gordon Hughes, CEO, American Business Media.  We were interviewed by Matthew Schwartz of Scribe Media in Scribe's very impressive studio. Not only are magazine publishers adapting to the digital age but they are now offering advertisers a variety of new tools and formats that were unheard of 10 years ago.  Through Gordon’s stewardship the ABM membership is living the results that we published from  MME 2010 – namely that media sellers must become consultants and demonstrate to marketers how to effectively navigate the choppy waters. 

To learn more about this topic, tune in to the videocast at: 
http://www.scribemedia.org/2008/07/29/from-print-to-digital-business-advertisers/

I hope you have as much fun watching as Gordon and I did participating!

Marketing Accountability Rocks

By Barbara Bacci Mirque:

At the recent ANA Marketing Accountability Conference, we heard from a series of marketing accountability practitioners including Doug Palladini from Vans, Dean Adams from 3M, Rich Martino from US Bank, Pat LaPointe filling in for Blair Gibson from Merck, Karna Crawford from Coke, and Jay Gillespie from Fiskars.  Ed Abrams from IBM was the master of ceremonies. The recurrent theme from the speakers:  CFO buy in is a great asset in the success of marketing accountability programs.  This is verified by the recent 2008 ANA/MMA Marketing Accountability survey in which we saw positive movement in the marketing/finance relationship over the past year.   

Build a culture of inclusion with finance and you will be on your way to a successful marketing accountability effort. Jay Gillespie told us how by including finance in consumer focus groups there is now such buy in that often the CFO will intervene when cost cutting discussions ensue and claim that it is important to build the brand!  Dean Adams mentioned that at 3M the controller is on the same floor as marketing and Karna Crawford noted that at the Coca Cola Company, finance is integrated into the marketing teams.  Ed Abrams said that at IBM it is not just finance that has a seat at the marketing table but also sales and general management functions.  When you don’t do this the results are that finance will not buy into your numbers, they won’t trust marketing and they won’t take the marketing numbers to the street.

If we don’t want marketing to be considered the black box that asks for cash we must implement these simple strategies.  ANA members can obtain more information about this important topic by joning the ANA Marketing Accountability Committee and visiting the ANA Marketing Insights Center and searching "marketing accountability".

Marketing conversation

By: Barbara Bacci Mirque

Thanks for nothing Joe old friend!  Joe Jaffe spoke at this past Thursday's ANA Integrated Marketing Conference.  He gave an enlightening talk about conversational marketing and how the organizations which differentiate themselves in this fashion will be truly integrated.  Transforming marketing from a one to many to marketing as a conversation was also a key finding from the cross industry MME 2010 survey conducted last October among ANA members. One of Joe's prognostications was that instead of a CMO, every organization should have a Chief Conversation Officer.  My boss immediately emailed me to say that is you Barbara so let's change your title.  Before he heard Joe speak, my boss was thinking about changing my EVP title to CMO as among my many responsibilities I am the chief strategist for ANA communications which includes marketing to the ANA member base as well as our external audiences.  While I agree with Joe, my mother and I were looking forward to that CMO title. 

At the ANA I am fortunate to meet and work with the world's leading CMOs are a brilliant and formidable group. Having the same title as these marketing luminaries was going to make my mother very happy. This was going to be my payback to her for not becoming a lawyer and not marrying one either. But now because of Joe, my title might become Chief Conversation Officer and my mother's friends are going to have no idea what that means. Joe, do you really want to disappoint a very sweet, grey haired lady that way? 

Marketing & Media Ecosystem 2010

By Barbara Bacci Mirque

Marketing fundamentals have not changed, but the strategies, investments and capabilities required to succeed in marketing are being transformed.  The reshaping of our complex media environment will require changes across the marketer-agency-media value chain.

Marketing & Media Ecosystem 2010 (MME 2010) identifies the priorities, capabilities and partnerships required across the marketer - agency - media value chain to optimize now and prepare for the future. The first phase of this joint study between the ANA, IAB (Interactive Advertising Bureau), AAAA (American Association of Advertising Agencies) and management consulting firm Booz Allen Hamilton was unveiled last year at the ANA 2007 Annual Masters of Marketing Conference. The second phase of this multi-year study, was recently completed by the IAB.

Senior marketing executives recognize the importance of creating a “Digitally Savvy” organization and culture, but less than one in four agree their organizations are currently digitally savvy.  Media companies are  responding to the expectations of marketers by developing creative, offering behavioral targeting, generating consumer insights, and helping calculate ROI as they join marketers and agencies in re-tooling their agenda to drive growth and connect to the consumer.  Marketers indicate that the ability to deliver consumer insights such as behavioral patterns and needs will become increasingly important,  and they are leveraging one-to-one consumer interactions (including ethnography) and digital channels that provide real-time behaviors and patterns.  ANA members are experimenting with making their consumers advocates by shifting marketing objectives from sending a message to facilitating conversations them.

Stay tuned for more updates from this important research in the coming months. ANA members can read the MME 2010 white papers at http://www.ana.net/michome.

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.

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.

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