I Know Performance Marketing, and You, Sir, Are Not Performance Marketing

Today’s rant is about so-called “performance marketing.” But to make it, I must first address football. Bear with me…

Football is followed by all ages with a passion often reserved for summer barbecues, church revivals and The Bachelor. Both beautiful and violent, football can be eyes-glued-to-the-screen drama. It can break your heart and lift your soul all within moments.

At the same time, it is a non-stop ATM for its fortunate few owners, the players who captivate us and the suite owners who run businesses able to capitalize on the world’s most popular sport.

The sport is also one of the simplest.

Hold on, Jay, you might say. Football is anything but simple. In fact, it’s so complex we still don’t always know if a catch is really a catch.

And I say, No, I’m not talking about American football. I’m talking about fútbol—the real football. 

You see, the rest of the world has been playing fútbol in its original forms since 206 B.C.—long before Rutgers played Princeton in 1869 in a new American game that looked kind of like rugby but had different rules. Despite fútbol’s global popularity and the fact it’s played with feet, we loud, obnoxious, parochial Americans proclaim our football is the “real” football, even though we kick the ball only on occasion and a team’s success is largely based on how well the players perform with their hands.

Our football is high-scoring. It is savage. It is often as much a battle in the muddied trenches as it is an awe-inspiring ballet by some of the greatest athletes on earth. It is also incredibly addictive. We love this game so much we’re willing to bet billions each year in the hopes of winning a few bucks.

And here’s the (ahem) kicker: We demand that the world’s most popular sport—one played by more than 250 million people in more than 200 countries and one that actually relies on the use of a foot—be called “soccer” so to not create confusion with our non-foot-based football.

Consider this: Nearly 115 million people worldwide watched Super Bowl 50, and those people spent more than $12 billion on game-related food and beverages. Advertisers further spent $5 million for just 30 seconds of air time during the game, and for most, it was a smart buy. No one can dispute our football’s incredible success. We even take our football to the U.K. three times a year—and demand it be called football in a country so passionate about its fútbol that it has traveling hooligans who make Raider fans seem like the Wimbledon elite.

So Jay, tell us—why exactly are you ranting about American football vs. fútbol/soccer?

I am because it illustrates this point: The right label, loads of confidence and a louder voice can run roughshod over even the most successful entity preceding it.

My sporting tangent relates to a label battle between the original fútbol of performance-based marketing and the newer, louder American football of Performance Marketing.

A relatively new cottage industry, Performance Marketing is a term used to describe digital media marketers who get paid only for the ads defined as having “worked.” I get it. Name fits. But it ticks me off. Here’s why: That term makes it sound like theirs is the only performance marketing, which, to me, is as crazy as coopting the name “fútbol” for an entirely different sport.

You see, since 1983, I have been running with my fellow direct marketers in a race to the bottom. Oh, our work has been demonstrably great and it’s made our clients billions of dollars. But we could never find a moniker for ourselves that would elevate us from the basement of the shiny agency offices.

What started as Direct Marketing eventually became labeled Direct Mail. When 1-800 numbers were in fashion, we went back to Direct Marketing to sound less single channeled. Then IBM’s super computers came along and we utilized reel-to-reel data to perform Data-Based Marketing. Once some brands turned to television to direct their message, we became DRTV. Then compiled, rentable data increased and our clients started transitioning from transaction-based databases to marketing databases. We realized we could be much more effective at modeling so we could test across a broad matrix of offers/creative/segment, cross-sell, up-sell, correct attrition at its earliest stage and ultimately maximize customer LTV. We changed our moniker to Relationship Marketing. Then along came third-party sales-management software, and suddenly we were changed again—this time to CRM.

(Ironically, we smart direct marketing guys clearly suffered from a branding problem, but that’s a rant for another time.)

Despite all those naming attempts, the bottom line is that performance was and is the essence of what we do every day. Test, revalidate, control, rinse, repeat. We were the only marketing segment that could prove ROI to the penny. Yet while we proudly gloated together about case study after case study, we still hung our heads and mumbled when we talked to “real” ad folk upstairs. And now along comes a bunch of kids, with their rock-and-roll music and their media buying/selling gamble, boldly shouting out that they are Performance Marketers (shortly after creating a Wiki page). Damn it! We spend three decades chasing the right label, and these punks nail it on their first try. Worse yet, they get to work upstairs with the cool kids while we’re still stuck next to the radon detectors near the boiler room.

I will not allow the work we’ve done since Caples sat down at his piano to be relegated to being called soccer. From this date forward, I am owning the term Performance Marketing, and I am asking all others who do what I do to rise up and call themselves Performance Marketers too.

Now off to my bicycle to chase down a spectacular lowering Spring sun, while listening to uplifting music to escape the other rants in my head. I call this form of therapy, swimming.