Empower CMOs to grow their brands

Part 1 of 3 from "The Long, The Short & The Missing Middle" article series. Read Part 2 here.

Author: Theo Theodorou, Managing Director at Microsoft Advertising - Listen to this LinkedIn article on Spotify below:

To put brand marketing in reach of more marketers, we need to make it accountable - Thanks to the digital transformation of marketing, that’s what we can aim for.

Every educated marketer knows that brand marketing does its most important work over the long term. They’ve studied the work of Binet and Field and The Ehrenberg Bass Institute. They’ve seen the handy graphs that show the cumulative impact of brand investments adding up over years. They’ve pored over the numbers that demonstrate how sustained brand investment translates into fame, salience, and major competitive advantage. They know that brand is marketing’s long game. If you’re a marketer that knows these things, then you almost certainly know something else too.

"Brand marketing is difficult and complex to measure." - Theo Theodorou.

It can’t be judged in the same terms as this week’s performance marketing push or by its impact on this quarter’s revenue numbers. In fact, many would argue that its creativity and effectiveness depend on not tethering brand marketing to short-term numbers.

1. Marketing's measurement disparity

This lack of accountability is traditionally seen as a shield for brand marketing creativity. But arguing that we have to wait extended periods for hard evidence of any benefits feels increasingly out of place in a digital marketing landscape. In the latest CMO Survey from Deloitte, Duke FUQUA, and the American Marketing Association, CMOs are 60% less likely to prove the value of brand marketing quantitatively.?Only 6.3% use brand equity metrics. While sales and revenue are measured regularly, brand is ad-hoc.

Failing to push for more accountability for brand marketing ensures that it’s only a viable option for businesses that can afford speculative marketing investments. That sells the majority of marketers short in a way that’s no longer necessary. We need to be less patient where evidence of brand’s impact is concerned.

Click here to download the eBook.

2. No marketer should accept the possibility that half their budget is wasted

We can all name a famous ad (or several) as evidence that we shouldn’t try too hard to quantify brand creativity. Guinness’s Surfers, Cadbury’s Gorilla, Burger King’s Mouldy Whopper, Oreo’s Dunk in the Dark Super Bowl tweet: these campaigns over-rode focus group feedback or concern over short-term impact in favour of the hard-to-define brand benefits that come from being memorable over time. They’re typically regarded as evidence for brand creativity and brand investments not being overly scrutinised too soon.

But before we conclude that creative excellence avoids worrying too much about quantifying results or short-term impact, let’s consider a few facts about these campaigns.

• Firstly, most of them come from a time when visibility into the impact of ads didn’t exist in anything like the terms it does today. Gorilla and Surfers were developed in a data environment that had more in common with that of John Wanamaker or Lord Leverhulme (the two people who might have said, “half of my advertising budget is wasted but I don’t know which half”) than that of today. Fast-forward to Oreo's famous tweet and there’s still little to go on beyond views, likes, and shares.
• Secondly, most of these campaigns did seek to prove impact using whatever quantitative data was available to them at the time – and they’d have been hungry for more data had it been available (having to rely on the subjective focus groups that nearly killed the Guinness campaign used to be a particular frustration for ad industry creatives).
• Thirdly, and most importantly, they were all campaigns for some of the world’s biggest brands – and some of the world’s biggest discretionary marketing budgets.

This is the real danger if we persist with the myth that the brand can’t have a measurable impact we can expect to see in the current financial year. For most businesses in the current environment, that pretty much eliminates it as an option. It’s like making the case for someone to lock away a large portion of their income in a pension that they can’t touch for up to a decade – when that person is in debt and seriously struggling to pay the monthly bills. Big multinationals of the past might have been able to afford the idea of ad budget being wasted in pursuit of a bigger benefit. Most marketers today can’t.

3. Aligning brand with business planning

In the CMO Survey, 58.7% of CMOs reported increased pressure from their CEO to prove the value of marketing. Partly as a result, brand advertising is the only category of marketing investment where growth is declining following the pandemic.

If brand marketing is to become a credible, accessible option for most marketing teams, it needs to be accountable in a way and on a timeframe that C-suite executives understand and appreciate. That’s not to say that it has to drive direct action and immediate sales and ROI – but we do need to get serious about finding ways to make it accountable in the short-term as well as the long. The digital transformation of marketing that’s been accelerated by the pandemic means that we’re in a better position than ever to do this.

It tunes us into signals from what Microsoft calls The Missing Middle of the marketing funnel – the crucial stages through which initial brand awareness translates into relevant mental availability, perceptions, intentions, familiarity and favourability. This doesn’t happen at a consistent speed or at a pace that fits in with quarterly reporting – but it’s a process that is happening all the time. Brand may do its best work over the long term, but it starts this work straight away – taking its place among other touchpoints buyers experience, influencing the impact of short-term marketing, and producing data signals that we can interrogate in order to understand and plan around this process.

4. Making brand accountable

We can start analysing the correlation between mass-reach brand advertising impressions and metrics that point onwards in the buyer journey, such as a brand’s share of search. Is there a connection? And how long does it take for this connection to form? The answers will be different for each category, but they can provide a framework through which we can start to make informed decisions, and provide evidence of future impact before it happens.

We can track whether exposure to brand ads leads to increased engagement with other touchpoints, and the frequency of exposure that’s required before engagement rates tick up. Similarly, we can explore whether people who show signs of intent and interest become more interested and engaged with brand campaigns. One emerging opportunity for doing this involves increasing the visibility of brands in intent-oriented environments.

"We can use Search Engine Results Pages as opportunities?for branding through display and video ads – not just opportunities for driving clicks".

- Theo Theodorou.

All of this is a long way from the mindset of last-click attribution that soured digital marketing’s relationship to the brand several years ago and helped to push the top and the bottom of the funnel apart. A new generation of indicators won’t give a full picture of the return on brand investments, nor the many different ways in which brand campaigns contribute to business success. However, they will start to make the brand measurable and accountable in a timeframe that’s relevant to most business planning. That makes it more accessible to more marketers.

At Microsoft, we believe that the mission of technology is to democratise opportunity. That’s as true of marketing as it is of any other profession. By making brand marketing more accountable, we can make holistic, sustainable growth strategies accessible to a far wider range of businesses. Now is a great time to start.

***

For more on The Missing Middle of the marketing funnel – and how engaging with it can lead to a new view of brand impact –?explore our full eBook: The Long, The Short and The Missing Middle

Follow Microsoft Advertising on LinkedIn to get the latest news and insights for Marketers.