Talentless Advertising

The advertising management's silence over the constantly emerging evidence

that advertising does not work speaks far too loudly.

Glaciers are melting more speedily than the ability of advertising to become

accountable. What is surprising is that a global commercial organization such

as advertising can operate like this. Advertising agencies act as if it has

no need to answer to their Clients! Advertising Management has been tested and

found wanting. What all this is showing is that the Senior Management, those at

the top of the Agencies, are not working. There is a communications and

management failure within advertising agencies.

Everyone is saying it (or, to be more accurate, whining about it). The

advertising business is in a state of upheaval. Everyone is blaming it on

technology and the rapid rate of change it is causing. Hello -- it isn't the

technology, folks. The technological change is simply making it easier to

diagnose the real challenge. The one that has been around since the dawn of our

industry but that, thankfully, we've been able to side step.

The decline of moral responsibility has damaged the advertising and marketing

industry, it is the real flaw behind the advertising crisis. There has to be a

complete change of thinking and regulation of the world's marketing industry.

Certainly Clients cannot risk again the degree of unaccountability as have be

practiced up to now. Advertising agencies need to change their behavior, they

need to re-establish relations with their Clients and gain a better

understanding of the communication process...by using Interactive Marketing Communication,

properly executed!

Making Marketing Measure

For years, corporate marketers have walked into budget meetings like

neighborhood junkies. They couldn't always justify how well they spent past

handouts or what difference it all made. They just wanted more money -- for

flashy TV ads, for big-ticket events, for, you know, getting out the message and

building up the brand.

But those heady days of blind budget increases are fast being replaced

with a new mantra: measurement and accountability. Armed with reams of data,

increasingly sophisticated tools, and growing evidence that the old tricks

simply don't work, there's hardly a marketing executive today who isn't

demanding a more scientific approach to help defend marketing strategies in

front of the chief financial officer. Marketers want to know the actual return

on investment (ROI) of each dollar. They want to know it often, not just

annually. And increasingly they want a view of likely returns on future

campaigns. "Marketing has gone from being a cost or expense to an investment,"

notes Martyn Straw, chief strategy officer of ad agency BBDO Worldwide, who says honing an ROI system for clients is his main job. "Call marketing an equity investment, and suddenly there's lots of accountability in the room." The push is coming from the top ranks. CEOs, CFOs, and even board

directors, have relentlessly cut costs in every corner of their companies except

marketing and are fed up with funneling cash into TV commercials and glossy ads

that they say cost more and seem to do less. That's especially true at a time

when profits are under attack and consumers of all ages are zapping ads and

spending more time playing video games and surfing the Internet. The bean

counters know that marketing matters. But they're hazy about how much or what

kind.

That's one reason companies are increasingly shifting their dollars from

TV and print ads to the Net and direct marketing. They can get a swift and

accurate measure of the impact of their efforts for a fraction of the cost of

advertising in traditional media. DaimlerChrysler , for example, is relying less on 30-second TV ads in favor of events where names, profiles, and addresses of prospects can be collected and tracked. It's

also pushing direct marketing and online advertising where response rates are

easily measured. "You better believe my money is chasing media and marketing

outlets that can prove their return in hard data," says Jeff Bell,

vice-president- Chrysler/Jeep marketing.

Companies in every segment of American business have become obsessed with

honing the science of measuring marketing performance. Consumer-products giants

such as Procter & Gamble, Kraft Foods , and Gillette are further along this path, having long chased statistics to link different forms of marketing to sales and brand awareness. But the desire to

construct a comprehensive set of performance measures -- what many call a

marketing "dashboard" -- is fast extending to marketers in other industries as

well. Xerox Corp. uses the measurement techniques of Six Sigma to analyze marketing's impact

on a range of measures, from leads generated to cost per sale. Home Depot Inc.

has a proprietary computer model with sophisticated algorithms that

correlate marketing investments with product sales and regional variations that

have led the retailer, for example, to push paint using radio spots in some

markets and newspaper inserts in others. "Marketing ROI is one of the most

difficult things to measure in retailing because of all the details," says John

Costello, executive vice-president for merchandising and marketing. But, he

adds, the ability to do it right is fast becoming a competitive advantage.

For many, the goal is to identify and cultivate potential buyers -- and

then track whether they respond to marketing efforts by ultimately making a

purchase. Mark R. LaNeve, head of North American marketing and advertising for

General Motors Corp. , cites customer tracking as the carmaker's top priority. "We do less and

less advertising simply because it feels right," says LaNeve. There are no more

sponsored golf tournaments, for example, unless the sponsoring brand collects a

healthy number of customer profiles through test drives. Those people are then

tracked every time GM runs into them through a similar event or mailing and

again when they buy a GM vehicle. Such measures have helped GM halve Cadillac's

marketing spending over the last three years while increasing sales, market

share, and awareness. Although marketing giants such as GM know they have to be

on TV to launch models and blitz airwaves with a new rebate deal, the share of

the marketing budget going to network TV is steadily declining. LaNeve says he

knows with 98% certainty what the payoff of a direct-marketing campaign will be

before committing a cent. Yet the impact of image-building TV and print ads --

as opposed to those pitching rebates -- remains mostly "a mystery or educated

guess." Indeed, the Holy Grail of measurement is to figure out the impact of

traditional mass advertising, especially the 30-second TV commercial. One of the

most elaborate efforts involves a joint venture between Arbitron Inc.

, a media and marketing research firm, and VNU

the Dutch media company that owns Nielsen. "Project Apollo" next year will

begin tracking the media habits of 30,000 households representing 70,000

consumers. "Panelists" wear a pager-like device that picks up all the

electronically coded TV and radio they consume. That data, plus online usage and

grocery purchases scanned in half the households, and frequent surveys of

attitudes and lifestyle choices should help advertisers figure out which of

their marketing tactics really pay. Procter & Gamble Co.

which spent $4.4 billion on advertising in the last fiscal year, has

already signed on as a subscriber. P&G is looking for the system to tell it

whether it's better off funding an end-aisle display in 2,000 grocery stores or

increasing its radio ad buy for a month in the same markets. "It's not

perfect," admits Arbitron's project head Linda Dupree. "But the information they

get will be the best they have ever had."

PERFORMANCE ANXIETY

Because advertisers work with multiple ad agencies there's a push to

establish some benchmarks and standards for measuring ROI. The CMO Council, a

Silicon Valley network of close to 1,000 chief marketing officers at tech

companies, released an extensive report of marketing performance measurements in

October. Merely counting eyeballs no longer seemed enough once the tech bubble

burst, says the report's editor-in-chief, William Glazier. Yet fewer than 15% of

council members have a comprehensive model in place. For all the effort to bring science to marketing, the art component will never go away. Figuring out how much of a product's appeal is due to marketing

and how much stems from innovative features or quality is often hard to pin

down, even for individual consumers. They don't know why they like it, they just

do. That's the human factor -- and so far, no one has found a way to measure

that.

Failure Of Web Advertising

Failure Of Web Advertising

We're about 15 years into the internet revolution as a mainstream phenomenon

and by any measure internet advertising has to be deemed a major failure.

While the web itself has been a massive success (influencing virtually every

aspect of our lives) advertising on the web is mostly a bad joke.

Fifteen years into its mainstream life, television had created scores of

powerful consumer-facing brands.The only truly powerful brands I can

think of that web advertising has created are native web brands like Google,

Yahoo, Amazon and Facebook. It's as if the only brands television was good at

creating were CBS, NBC and ABC.After 15 years, can anyone name even

ten serious non-native consumer-facing brands that have been created

primarily by web advertising? Is there a brand of coffee, butter, beer, bread,

chicken, gasoline, soda, peanut butter, dog food, milk, tires, potato chips,

life insurance, lawn mowers...don't make me go on, you get the point...that has

been built primarily by web advertising? Display advertising is a joke.

Remember just a few years ago when they were selling us banner ads on the

promise that "interactivity" would make these ads so much more efficient than

traditional ads? Then they started measuring them and found that fewer than 2

people in a thousand were clicking. Oops.Now they're making the same

lame "branding" argument for online display ads they made against

traditional print ads. However armed with the proper understanding of the meaning of interaction,

properly executed, the web can be made to achieve everthing you have ever wanted!

Marketers are shifting from input-based

Marketers are shifting from input-based to outcome-based plans and measurements.
Where once they asked, ‘What is the
cost per thousand of the audience I am
buying?’ Today they are demanding,
‘How many people came through the
purchase funnel into my store as a
result of this campaign?’"
And you can only do that accurately with
Interactive Marketing Communication!

Interactive Communication

"Interactive Communication, properly executed, is the foundation for improving marketing,
building business performance, enhancing productivity and streamlining critical processes. That is why the drive to embed accountability as a core marketing discipline will only increase.

With it will come enhanced marketing ROI."




And only with Interactive Communication!

Marketing Accountability

"Marketing accountability is the foundation for improving marketing,

building business performance, enhancing productivity and

streamlining critical processes. That is why the drive to embed

accountability as a core marketing discipline will only increase.

With it will come enhanced marketing ROI."



And Interactive Communication, properly executed, is the only way to  pureRO

."


.





 
 

Chaotic,Evasive,Bungling - That's Marketing and Advertising for You!

Torrents of criticism for Marketing Leaders exist.
Most Advertising Agency leaders are unforthcoming and highly selective in their accountability.
Their accountability falls well short of the standards expected by Clients. Marketing and Advertising providers aren't necessarily the slick, smooth operators they can seem when they bid for work. What we also have discovered by now is having shareholders, a whizzy logo and a global footprint is no guarantee of competence. Add to that the fact that Public Trust of Advertising and Marketing is at an all time low. Urgent improvements, both the the way advertising agencies are run and the way they are accountable is needed if public and market confidence is restored.
The fraud on the internet will add to the distrust!
Advertising Agencies have treated consumers as a Ponzi scheme. Success in marketing and advertising has been bought by promises with costs far in excess of reality. We have hoped for a tomorrow in which record sales growth will yield record levels of marketing expenditures to cover the promises when they come due . The problem?....tomorrow never comes!!
Our legacy to our successors should not be temporary austerity but a permant, massive reform of Marketing and Advertising. We have to be unflinching and utterly practical in recognising the scale of the challange.
All this would mean an attitude in both Marketing and Advertising strongly focused on performance and accountability.
We are all but guaranteed overspending and slow growth if we cannot hold both both Marketing and Advertising to account. Our economic crisis is not the moment to delay reform but to accelerate it by questioning the received wisdom in every aspect of our economy, especially Marketing and Advertising.
Our Financial, political,business and media elites are under attack as never before.After a perfect storm of venality, we are experiencing a great reckoning. Morality, personal integrity, which used to seem antique or quaint values, are back on the agenda.
After it emerged that big banks were selling dodgy derivatives and lying about their balance sheets in 2008, trust in all institutions, not just financial houses, began to unravel. If bankers, the people we trust with our money, could lie, steal and cheat, and expect to get away with it because their institutions were too big to fail, what was going on in the other citadels of power?
We must hasten to properly develop interactive opportunities already proven.

Yet Another Company Claims Facebook Ad Clicks Are Mostly From Bot

Yet Another Company Claims Facebook Ad Clicks Are Mostly From Bot

A recent post on its company page, Limited Run, a New York company that offers website solutions to artists and musicians claimed, 80% of the clicks from its ads were from bots.
Limited Run said it could only verify 15-20% of the clicks on its site through a host of standard analytic solutions, which led to it building its own custom software for tracking.
The company explains: Unfortunately, while testing their ad system, we noticed some very strange things. Facebook was charging us for clicks, yet we could only verify about 20% of them actually showing up on our site. At first, we thought it was our analytics service. We tried signing up for a handful of other big name companies, and still we couldn't verify more than 15-20% of clicks. So we did what any good developers would do. We built our own analytic software. Here's what we found: on about 80% of the clicks Facebook was charging us for, JavaScript wasn't on. And if the person clicking the ad doesn't have JavaScript, it's very difficult for an analytics service to verify the click. What's important here is that in all of our years of experience, only about 1-2% of people coming to us have JavaScript disabled, not 80% like these clicks coming from Facebook. So we did what any good developers would do.
We built a page logger. Any time a page was loaded, we'd keep track of it. You know what we found? The 80% of clicks we were paying for were from bots.
Limited Run claims they contacted Facebook, who "wouldn't reply."Facebook declined to respond immediately on this issue when reached by Tom Mango, co-founder of Limited Run, explained further: Technically speaking, we used about 6 different analytics services as well as built our own analytics system to try and confirm the ad click throughs from Facebook. The way client side analytics works is that it will try and load some JavaScript on the page and, if that doesn't work, it just loads a single image. On about 80% of the incoming page requests from our ad campaigns, neither the JavaScript or the images were being loaded. Normal web browsers, used by normal people, will load both JavaScript and images. However, bots, such as ones that crawl the web or bots that attempt to hack into websites to leave spam comments on blogs, don't usually load those
extra things like JavaScript and images. This is how we came to the conclusion that the majority of the click throughs we were getting were from bots. We have no idea who the bots are run by and don't think Facebook has anything to do with them.
As it turns out, this issue while not everyday news, is not new for Facebook. In June of 2009, complaints arose regarding discrepancy in ad clicks versus what clients could verify. Facebook verified a discrepancy and claimed to be implementing appropriate changes. A month later, In April of this past year, the two companies along with others were denied certification for a class action in a District Court in California.
The final straw for Limited Run came unrelated to the click issue, it was regarding changing the name on its company page: While we were testing Facebook ads, we were also trying to get Facebook to let us change our name, because we're not Limited Pressing anymore. We contacted them on many occasions about this. Finally, we got a call from someone at Facebook. They said they would allow us to change our name. NICE! But only if we agreed to spend $2000 or more in advertising a month. That's correct. Facebook was holding our name hostage In regards to that specific issue, Facebook gave us the following statement:
We're currently investigating Limited Run's claims. For their issue with the Page name change, there seems to be some sort of miscommunication. We do not charge Pages to have their names changed. Our team is reaching out about this now.Unlike others, Limited Run isn't accusing Facebook of fraud. The company startup-claims-80-of-its-facebook-ad-clicks-are-coming-from-bots it could have been a competitor attempting to sabotage the firm through increased ad costs. Nonetheless, Facebook admits it might haveas many as 50 million fake users Mango reiterated that it wasn't the clicks that led Limited Run to leave Facebook, it was the customer service. While he acknowledges Limited Run is smaller than a lot of Facebook's clients, it raises questions over how widespread the problem might be, even if it's not widely reported. At a time when effectiveness of the social network's ads are constant debated this surely doesn't help.
A recent post on its company page, Limited Run, a New York company that offers website solutions to artists and musicians claimed, 80% of the clicks from its ads were from bots.
Limited Run said it could only verify 15-20% of the clicks on its site through a host of standard analytic solutions, which led to it building its own custom software for tracking.
The company explains: Unfortunately, while testing their ad system, we noticed some very strange things. Facebook was charging us for clicks, yet we could only verify about 20% of them actually showing up on our site. At first, we thought it was our analytics service. We tried signing up for a handful of other big name companies, and still we couldn't verify more than 15-20% of clicks. So we did what any good developers would do. We built our own analytic software. Here's what we found: on about 80% of the clicks Facebook was charging us for, JavaScript wasn't on. And if the person clicking the ad doesn't have JavaScript, it's very difficult for an analytics service to verify the click. What's important here is that in all of our years of experience, only about 1-2% of people coming to us have JavaScript disabled, not 80% like these clicks coming from Facebook. So we did what any good developers would do.
We built a page logger. Any time a page was loaded, we'd keep track of it. You know what we found? The 80% of clicks we were paying for were from bots.
Limited Run claims they contacted Facebook, who "wouldn't reply."Facebook declined to respond immediately on this issue when reached by Tom Mango, co-founder of Limited Run, explained further: Technically speaking, we used about 6 different analytics services as well as built our own analytics system to try and confirm the ad click throughs from Facebook. The way client side analytics works is that it will try and load some JavaScript on the page and, if that doesn't work, it just loads a single image. On about 80% of the incoming page requests from our ad campaigns, neither the JavaScript or the images were being loaded. Normal web browsers, used by normal people, will load both JavaScript and images. However, bots, such as ones that crawl the web or bots that attempt to hack into websites to leave spam comments on blogs, don't usually load those
extra things like JavaScript and images. This is how we came to the conclusion that the majority of the click throughs we were getting were from bots. We have no idea who the bots are run by and don't think Facebook has anything to do with them.
As it turns out, this issue while not everyday news, is not new for Facebook. In June of 2009, complaints arose regarding discrepancy in ad clicks versus what clients could verify. Facebook verified a discrepancy and claimed to be implementing appropriate changes. A month later, In April of this past year, the two companies along with others were denied certification for a class action in a District Court in California.
The final straw for Limited Run came unrelated to the click issue, it was regarding changing the name on its company page: While we were testing Facebook ads, we were also trying to get Facebook to let us change our name, because we're not Limited Pressing anymore. We contacted them on many occasions about this. Finally, we got a call from someone at Facebook. They said they would allow us to change our name. NICE! But only if we agreed to spend $2000 or more in advertising a month. That's correct. Facebook was holding our name hostage In regards to that specific issue, Facebook gave us the following statement:
We're currently investigating Limited Run's claims. For their issue with the Page name change, there seems to be some sort of miscommunication. We do not charge Pages to have their names changed. Our team is reaching out about this now.Unlike others, Limited Run isn't accusing Facebook of fraud. The company startup-claims-80-of-its-facebook-ad-clicks-are-coming-from-bots it could have been a competitor attempting to sabotage the firm through increased ad costs. Nonetheless, Facebook admits it might haveas many as 50 million fake users Mango reiterated that it wasn't the clicks that led Limited Run to leave Facebook, it was the customer service. While he acknowledges Limited Run is smaller than a lot of Facebook's clients, it raises questions over how widespread the problem might be, even if it's not widely reported. At a time when effectiveness of the social network's ads are constant debated this surely doesn't help.

ACCOUNTABILITY AND INTERACTIVE COMMUNICATION

With corporations under increased pressure to show that every dollar they spend delivers results, marketing expenditures are now being held to the same level of accountability as other investments.

Clients expect to see detailed, quantifiable results for their marketing and advertising efforts that demonstrate a positive return on their investments.They want to know which elements of their marketing plan helped achieve their goals in the most efficient manner—and which did not—and be able to allocate their budgets on an ongoing basis accordingly.

This corporate attitude change comes just at a moment in time when advertisers face major challenges because:

Consumers are more difficult to reach than ever.

Reasons include:

Media options available to consumers have increased. Technologies that have been designed to suit consumers’ growing desire to be in control of what they see and hear have given consumers

the option to reject advertising messages.To determine what will yield the best results in planning their advertising efforts, advertisers and their agencies turn to research and analytic tools more and more to guide them in making decisions. However, the multitude of analytic options has led to confusion about what constitutes accountability and how to measure it.

With Interactive Communication, properly executed, this confusion ends and proper accountably exists. One exposure to an Interactive Programme is far more effective than "frequency" and allows Clients to cut, substantially, their heavy marketing expediture (s).

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Contact: paul.ashby@yahoo.com