What is Marketing success, to you?

I was superficial as a child. As most immigrants’ children, we tend to measure success by the material goods we accumulate. I’m glad that changed for me as I got older but it took a while.

Right out of college I interned at an advertising agency, but since no one was driving a Ferrari to work, I quickly changed directions and took a job on WallSt. Within a couple years I got some nice cars and things but I wasn't as happy on WallSt as I was when I was creating cocktails of creativity and strategy for brands.

So in 2000, I decided to go back to advertising but no agency wanted to hire a Wall St. guy for their creative team. Looking back I don't blame them but I had to find another way. At the time Atom films (like youtube but 5 years earlier), was running a competition. The person with the most viewed video would create a campaign that would run during the Super Bowl. 

Luckily I won the competition, I came up with the insight “The small tech companies are the dangerous ones”, sounds obvious today but it wasn’t in 2000, with help from their creative team we created this:

Bloomberg wrote an article on the ad two days later that impacted me deeply. They were putting into question if the ad would be as successful as the previous years ad. The title was "Can thousands of squirrels lift EDS?", first I laughed at the funny title. I also started wondering why a financial newspaper was doing an article on an ad. It is something they never did before. Maybe it was because a "Wall St guy" was doing advertising.

The article called the prior campaign, "cat herding” a huge success. Even though the SVP was quoted saying in the article “it was hard to tell if "cat herding" had any impact on sales. It lifted awareness by 40%, though.” The boost in awareness last year had no impact on the bottom line, so why was Bloomberg, a financial paper, calling it a success? What is success to Bloomberg? That is when I realised that success is not the same for everyone.

The CEO of EDS had already stated that he needed a financial impact to be measure on this new campaign, so success to him was clear. So thanks to lessons from Jerome Conlon and Scott Bedbury when they turned NIKE into an icon, we followed their example. We threw out the reach and recall numbers and focused on brand perception and brand trust just as Nike and later Starbucks did when they turned those brands into icons. Top professionals found brand perception a better indicator to real financial ROI and Scott Bedbury was famous for saying I don't care how many people remember the ad, all I care about is do they like us more now then last year.

The results for EDS were great but I imagine the results would have been even better if the insight was though of to increase trust from the start. Later on, that is exactly what I did with Dove and the results have spoken for themselves.

The interesting part of all this and what impacted me so much, was the ending of that article: 

There's a lesson in all this: Measuring the effectiveness of advertising is more art than science. When each second of Super Bowl airtime blows through some $100,000, it's best to have some idea of the return on investment. Whether it's herding cats, running with the squirrels, or talking to a sock puppet, an ad's popularity and memorability can help -- but it may not always be the best barometer of future bottom-line benefits.

What shocked me so deeply is that at the time this was very contradictory to what all agencies told their clients, "High reach and awareness is the definition of success". Success to most brand managers was to get the most increased awareness but one of the largest financial newspapers and the CEO of EDS are saying awareness is not linked to ROI. Why was the marketing industry calling campaigns successful if it didn’t create much financial gain?

Being reminded of this time.

I was reading an article online, recently, that called a Portuguese campaign "gimmicky". It was actually the 5th campaign I see being called "gimmicky" or "quirky" by top international marketing publications. The next day I see brand managers and creative directors praising the work. Portuguese marketing publicity called these ads a huge success. It seemed that even though 16 years have gone by, marketing professionals were still calling "cute", "gimmicky", "cool" campaign a success just based on the likeablity or virility of the campaign.

These agencies and brands have intelligent people working for them, gimmick and quirky are two things you don't want to be considered. I'm sure they believe they are doing the right thing but even wikipedia defines gimmick marketing as generally thought to be of little relevance or use. (Wikipedia). It is not a compliment but they still praised it as a huge success.

Just two days after reading that article I see the quote below. It was a quote about 90 of 104 of the world’s “most effective” campaigns.

"We are judging for creative effectiveness, not efficiency! Instead, these (90 out of 104 Agencies trying to win Cannes Lion) shared media metrics about press coverage, views and engagement – which saves media costs, but does not change brand perception that leads to higher sales and profits. " - Anthony Wong, global director at Ogilvy & Mather.  

I realise we are far from agreeing on many things. 

Even now you have a large majority of agency professionals talking about the “ultra importance” of engagement, viral and social media when even Brad Smallwood, Facebook's VP/Measurement and Insights and head of its Marketing Science team has basically said these measurements are from people who refuse to realise the reality. (Warc)

"No matter how hard we try to weed out remaining shiny metrics, entrenched behaviors are hard to change. We continue to tell you how many 'clicks' your video has generated even though we have proven that clicks bear no correlation to sales, simply because you continue to ask."

Facebook's own research eventually found those metrics to have no impact on brands' performance and, as a result, has diminished the stature of "shiny" metrics such as users' "Likes," "Shares," and message posts.

Try something, stop reading the article. Ask one of colleges to define was is success in marketing in one phrase, but to include at least one KPI so that the definition is measurable. You will find that many of them will define marketing success as "Managing budget to achieve the most reach and recall for the money invested." This is the answer or close to this answer, we saw 81% of the time when we did that study in 4 different countries. This again is a definition of efficiency not effectiveness, as you will see in most of the replies you will receive. We need a new definition of marketing success if we are going to be effective and not just efficient. (BTW - share below definitions of success you have gotten from people.)

Can we agree on at least the definition of success!?!?

Successful marketing is anything that changes brand perception or product perception that leads to higher sales, profits or market share. 

If the entire globe starts wearing Coca-Cola stickers on their forehead but sales are going down, it is not successful with this definition. If your brand recall is very high and your awareness is also but market share was lost, it is not successful. Publications should never call it successful and no one should ever claim it is successful unless it leads to higher sales, profits or market share. Currently it feels like we are in an art gallery and people look at advertising and say "Wow now that is a successful ad" just because they were entertained by it. Much like the gimmick and quirky ads that were mentioned above. I loved those ads, I though they were funny, I identified with them, I also have no doubt that it will not impact sales as they expect it to unless they outspend the competing brands by a lot, but that is just a guess. When the sales numbers come in, and there is a financial result, there will no longer be an argument if it is successful, because there is accountability. Accountability is why marketing has lost so much power in the board room, because too many brands have none.

Advertising has a financial purpose, it is not art. Treating it as such is what has lowered the value of the CMO in many board rooms. Treating it as such is what makes your CFO think he can do marketing, it is why your security guard gives you an idea for an ad as you walk in the door. It is what made a Wall St guy think he already knew what he needed to know about marketing. If you don't start taking it serious, if WE don’t all respect our craft enough to at minimum only consider success to be a financial impact, why should anyone else treat our profession with respect?  

So, can we agree on at least one thing, the definition of successful marketing? Marketing is the growth engine of a company and us marketers need to take back the boardroom. We can't do that until we start agreeing on what marketing is suppose to do for a business. 

In Short.

This is actually true for all aspects of our life. We all have a vision of success, it is probably different than my vision of success. We subconsciously work towards what we define as success. When I was young, as you saw, I measured success stupidly by owning expensive things, probably why I bought a Ferrari as soon as I could. In our own personal life it is ok to define success as what ever we want, but when you are part of a marriage, a sports team or brand, you need a joint definition of success to be successful.

About NYLON.

?www.nylongroup.com

We don't believe in telling stories, we believe you must become a story with telling. That story must be recognisable in the 100s of interaction customers have with your brand, not just a commercial or print ad.

To become a story worth telling, brands need to become like Gandhi, Mandela, and so on. They need a unique Point of View: Purpose | Originality | Values ?, a mix of emotional, functional and social benefits.

Helping brands achieve this is what gives us energy, especially on Monday morning.

(It is also why all our clients that follow P.O.V, have seen double-digit market share growth in the first year.)