In Justin Spohn’s latest post Shooting Ourselves on the Engagement Face he rails against the pseudo-science of justifying advertising expenditures in terms other than financial.
Justin mentions David Meerman Scott’s
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about executives who demand an ROI calculation on Web marketing or social media. The measurement that he is railing against is the methodical way of using complex calculations to measure how much money you are making when you spend money on something.
To a point, I agree with David. That kind of complex calculation is just not necessary in most cases. Perhaps if you are spending vast sums of money, but the plain truth is that most Web marketing campaigns are vastly underfunded, especially in proportion to the amount of time people are spending on the Web vs. other forms of media.
When you’re talking about the tiny amounts of money most companies spend on the Web, this kind of calculation isn’t the direction we need to go. We do however, need to be responsible to the numbers, and as Web marketers we should be the first ones championing financial responsibility.
The Advertising world, it seems, has a knee-jerk fear reaction when it comes to justifying their expensive ad campaigns. Not coming from the advertising agency world, I think this kind of justification is insane. I’m with Justin on this one.
Just because you can’t measure the ROI of a TV ad or a Billboard, doesn’t mean you shouldn’t be responsible to the numbers on the Web. It’s easy to track how many people came to your site, how many people saw your Web ad, how many people ordered something from you online. These are easy numbers to come up with, and they are easy to tie to financial numbers.
There’s no politicking necessary in Web marketing. Just make everyone responsible to the numbers and you’ll get exactly what you need out of your investment.
{ 2 comments… read them below or add one }
Hey Cory –
Nice response. I agree that different projects will require differing amounts of detail when it comes to showing results to the client, but I do want to push back on one point:
In your post, you say
“Perhaps if you are spending vast sums of money, but the plain truth is that most Web marketing campaigns are vastly underfunded, especially in proportion to the amount of time people are spending on the Web vs. other forms of media.”
Do you think though that there is any correlation between the amount of money devoted to web project and our collective historical interest in showing the value of our work? I think we all know that design is valuable to business, that advertising is valuable, and that certainly the web is valuable. But when asked to explain exactly HOW it’s valuable, or how valuable it is, we as an industry are terrible at that.
On the other side, if we address the needs of the business, then I think not only will they be less likely to stand in our way, but they will be more likely to add funding to our projects. A CFO may not care one bit about an interactive project, but if we show her that it’s making her company money, then she’ll invest more in it. All the better if interactive can do what other mediums can’t, it’s just more money for us.
Thoughts?
Great points Justin.
I think you’re trying to say that we’re not showing our value because we’re not being given enough money. The chicken & egg conundrum. Perhaps it’s also a certain amount of the artist’s lament, “My work is art, therefore I shouldn’t be subjected to the rigors of capitalism.” Unfortunately for the artist working in advertising, there’s a fiduciary responsibility.
The reason we, as an industry, are terrible at explaining our value is because we’re not steeped in it. We’re steeped in the art, the social, the networking, the message – but how many advertisers run a budget each quarter? Probably just the manager of the department, if that. You’re absolutely right in that we can do a better job of showing the correlation between Web-based marketing and the bottom line. It’s actually fairly easy to do, in comparison to any form of advertising (with the possible exception of a well-run direct mail campaign). We just have to have more of us steeped in the numbers, and we’ll start to be more aware of it.