The Short + Long Of It

Since the phrase 'performance marketing' was first coined, the debate about brand v sales, upper v lower, or many other constructs too numerous to repeat, has resulted in a discussion split into an imaginary forked road.

Option 1 : Do you want to sell products/services/leads at the most efficient $?

Option 2 : Do you want to build a brand with more sales based actions a secondary benefit?

And which path do you want to follow - because you can't really do both.

And for Media agencies, locked into optimisation buttons, selected in platforms, to specify the desired outcome for their clients, these binary questions remain at the core of how they respond to client or brand briefs.

Select Option 1 and you'll have a media plan that broadly equates to 35% Search, 35% Social and 35% mid funnel tactics. Select Option 2 and here come content partnerships and more editorial fueled responses.

But regardless of the inputs the chances are that when asked why the media plan is recommended you might see a slide like this. Search and Social the hero with TV the 'we can't afford it option'.

And here lies the problem. Because many analytics teams are programmed to work in the same real time dashboards their clients asked them to generate. And when you are asked to report weekly or even daily shouldn't these immediate effects be the important guide on how you respond?

New research amalgamating multiple MMM studies entitled Profit Ability 2, covering 141 brands with some $2B in paid media spend, is shining a new light on the long term effects of channel usage and reinforces some of the great work by the Long and Short of It team, Binet and Field.

Simply put, if you only look at immediate effects, your media plan will look the same as your competitors doing the exact same thing, and fighting over the exact same audiences.

But what if you looked a little longer term? How about the profit driven up to 13 weeks? Well things start to change.

SEM...drops to 3rd....Social scoots down to 5th...and our very old friend TV not only becomes first, but a dominating profit returner at that.

And the look longer? Maybe combined effects over time?

The results are even more pronounced.

So, what are we to take from this?

The answer is not 'use more TV'. The channel depends on the brief, the audience, the geography, B2B vs B2C and many other factors. However, the answer, the response from the agency has to be one that resists results measured only by weekly dashboards.

Analytics, simply put, should analyse holistically and resist the pressure to have a new answer every week.