The importance of measuring performance in digital marketing

Luke Brown is CEO and co-founder of Affinity and I caught up with him about their approach to digital advertising and the importance in clearly defining business and marketing success upfront and developing a strategy and optimising the execution against that objective.

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Transcription:

Darren:

Welcome to Managing Marketing and this week I’m joined by Luke Brown, CEO and co-founder of agency Affinity here in Sydney. Welcome, Luke.

Luke:

Thanks, Darren.

Darren:

Luke, I’ve read some of the opinion pieces that you’ve recently been placing in the trade press or trade media and I’ve been really impressed by your view of the marketing landscape but particularly one of the topics I wanted to discuss with you is that we’ve seen digital advertising grow and grow and grow for the last decade.

It’s been the darling of marketers. Everyone’s been talking about how terrific digital marketing is (and media) except in the last month or so. Suddenly it’s like the demon and everyone’s pointing the finger at how it’s ripping all the marketers off. What do you think’s happened?

Luke:

That’s a really good question. We believe that digital is a really incredibly powerful tool but it’s definitely been over-hyped and often oversold. It’s not a silver bullet for every situation.

Darren:

It is horses for courses, isn’t it? One of the things that cracks me up is the fact that so many people in the industry talk about it as if it’s either or. You either do digital or you stay the old-fashioned traditional. Whoever said it was a choice between one or the other?

Luke:

There is also this fallacy that digital is going to be cheaper for you and that is just insanity. The thing about digital is it takes increasing effort to optimise it and you need to put that time and resource into it otherwise you won’t get the outcome that you need at the end of it.

Darren:

One of the great things about the internet is that it has democratised the ability for people to be able to create content and put it out there as a way of attracting attention and engagement for their business. So, it is a channel that any business, small, medium or large, can actually access.

I remember in the television only days you were either a television advertiser because you had the big bucks or you weren’t. In that way it has provided access to a mass medium, hasn’t it?

Luke:

It definitely has and we work with a lot of smaller clients and we’ve been able to take them and scale them through digital more so than they would have been able to in any other medium because of the cost of entry but it’s about the smarts you put into it. And how you measure it and making sure that you’re driving to an outcome.

And I think that’s where too often people look at digital as a traditional media and it’s all about reach and frequency and that’s all there is to it. And that’s where they fall down because digital is beyond reach and frequency.

You can’t just look at the views that you get from something and let’s face it a view in Facebook is three seconds and without audio what is that really doing for your brand? YouTube is five seconds—that’s slightly better before the skip and you can pay for longer. You’re at least getting a little better metric but at the end of the day so what?

If you’re not tracking, ‘are you meeting your business outcomes?’, and that’s something that we’re really quite strong at here: really forcing how we’re going to measure outcomes and know that it’s working. Not months down the track when the cash register starts singing but straight away.

The marketing and sales opportunity of digital

Darren:

That’s one of the things I really like about the opinion you’ve been putting into the market place: that ultimately marketing is about changing behaviour or attitudes to deliver outcomes. But marketers who buy digital the same way as they bought television and press—cost per thousand—aren’t they actually missing the whole point of the opportunity that digital provides?

Luke:

Exactly, it’s a completely different medium and people are stuck in the 20th century paradigm about reach and frequency and digital can do so much more. And you need to look at direct correlations to a business goal not just a digital goal.

Who cares about likes and shares and other things? We need to bring it back down to the business goal at all times.

Darren:

My personal opinion is that digital is not necessarily good at getting mass reach and frequency fast. Television still performs very well. For all the stories about TV being dead a good television campaign can get you lot of awareness. What it can’t get you is any sort of engagement. Wouldn’t you agree?

Luke:

Totally, and with some of our clients we’re going to be submitting an Effie for them this year. We’ve programmatically built their brand through digital—through programmatic trading. And now we’re at a stage where we’ve got them enough money so they can be on TV so they can take that next level in their journey.

And so, digital has really enabled a lot of the smaller players who couldn’t ever really get to TV to come on a journey and grow and get to a television status brand.

Darren:

That’s brilliant because I talk to so many digital agencies that seem to think that it has to be digital from end to end, like, beginning, middle, and end—it’s all digital. They’re the ones that go, ‘oh, TV’s dead—no one’s watching TV’, which is just garbage. I don’t know why they say it.

Luke:

I don’t know either. Partly, I think because people don’t have competence in that area. Something that we’ve always understood as marketing professionals, our goal is not to sell out client an ad. In fact, that’s not our goal at all. It’s whatever is the right thing that they need. And sometimes, yes, it will be a TVC.

Darren:

If they can afford it and it’s right for what they’re trying to achieve.

Luke:

And if it’s going to be the most efficient thing for delivering it if they have the budget. But there are often a lot smarter things along the path to sale you can do that will influence your sales a lot more and then, yes, if you’ve got budget left over TV is a wonderful thing.

Certainly, our client mix has changed considerably over the last 18 months. We’re picking up bigger and bigger clients and TV is a right mix for them and certainly some of our smaller clients we’ve grown –they’ve got scale behind them now as products. They’re triple the size they were when they first met us and now they’re looking at other ways to get to the next level of growth.

Darren:

And that makes sense. You’ve actually taken them on this progression and at each stage used the appropriate channel to fulfil on strategy and deliver the objectives.

Luke:

Exactly. And we won’t be abandoning digital for them now that we’re doing their first TV campaign. Digital is a core part of the mix for them. It’s helped them grow 300 %.

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