In our work over the last two years with large corporations managing highly complex communications efforts, it has become abundantly clear to us that regardless of economic conditions and the desire reduce costs, what marketers most want is help driving higher returns on their marketing spend. There are very difficult ways and means of doing this. Here, we talk about the simplest way to approach it.

In our presentation with Microsoft to the ANA Agency Financial Management Conference earlier this year, we made a compelling case for corporations to focus on eliminating the more than $300 billion in wasted marketing efforts associated with poorly conceived and poorly directed marketing projects.

Not a single executive of the 300+ we met at that conference missed the point. None of the ANA members we met disagreed that waste due to poor agency input is a problem. This has also been true of meetings since then. Marketers from Land O’Lakes, Kao Brands, Advance Auto Parts, Dell, and Microsoft all concur. Yet much more pressing, in all of their minds, is the subject of what could be DONE with the repurposed spend.

Marketers all know that eliminating waste is beneficial, yet they are unified in their belief that dropping that savings directly to the bottom line is not their first priority. What they want is simple: more ROI. Travelport’s CMO Jon Hall put it crisply: “We spend marketing dollars to achieve business objectives. Smartly reinvesting savings translates directly into higher ROI across all programs. A marketer’s job is to grow the company.”

This is absolutely true. Every marketer sets out with the same objective—regardless of strategy or tactic, the mission is the same—every marketing strategy and tactic should drive revenue, share, margin, brand equity, or a combination of these. Yet in our experience, they do so at differing levels of impact, or “return on marketing investment.”
As with any dynamic system, marketing efforts have a bell-curve of effectiveness. Your company’s marketing efforts have a measurable return. No matter how difficult it is to accurately measure the impact of any one marketing effort, the total efforts, year after year, are quantifiable. If you don’t already know it, determine as closely as you can your total revenue, margin, and brand equity directly attributable to total marketing operating expense.

At that point, the benefits of improving the inputs to the marketing communications process become clear. Increase the quality of the direction to your agencies before you and they begin spending the enormous resources required to develop and execute creative, then get it into the marketplace via paid or even earned media. This is not extremely difficult, or expensive to do. And the results can be dramatic. The chart at the bottom of this post makes the point clearly. Better input yields higher ROI.

If you would like assistance determining your overall ROI, and figuring out how to dramatically improve all your marketing efforts, contact us at info@brieflogic.com for a 30 minute conversation.

How Better Briefs Impact Marketing ROI

Casey Jones. CEO – BriefLogic.

Highly approve of this recent AdAge article outlining five “best practices” for improving the client-agency relationships. Only one thought I’d like to add. It isn’t just the “creative brief,” but rather ALL briefs that need attention. Original article at: http://adage.com/columns/article?article_id=144550

The following post is in response to the AdAge article titled, “Planning Your Next Move in Ad Land: The Challenges and Pitfalls Ahead for the Industry 2010.”

The most successful agencies in the next decade will not be averse to procurement executives. They will neither think “dreaded procurement,” nor dread the questions posed by procurement. They are, at their essence, questions about value and differentiation. Is the agency service valuable? Is it different from the shop next door? If the answers are yes, there is little to dread. If no, then they have only themselves to blame.

Procurement is getting smarter the more they get involved. At the moment, many of their executives don’t understand our industry. That is changing rapidly. Even if they dial down the pressure (which is not likely) the rules governing agency revenues and profits will never change.

Create business value, in a way that is different from your competition. If you do, the field is yours . . .

http://www.jonesandbonevac.com/media.php

On October 12th, AdAge posted the article by Jack Neff titled: Why It’s Time to Do Away With the Brand Manager – P&G, Unilever Among Those Embracing New Roles in Social Media Age

Have any of you ever struggled with the term ‘advertising?’ I’ve been struggling with it since my early career at Ogilvy & Mather when I was first introduced to the concept of agency discipline integration. The most highly regarded publication in our industry is Advertising Age (AdAge). We also have the Association of National Advertisers (ANA), Advertising Week (AdWeek), and the 4As, the Association of American Advertising Agencies. Yet none of the companies who belong to the ANA or the 4As and few of the executives reading AdAge or AdWeek limit their forms of communication to advertising. In fact, saying that you are in advertising in the traditional sense has become something of a career-limiting statement. Advertising as a term, in its best sense, is used as synonymous for all the various disciplines of “persuasion” in Marketing, with the possible exception of direct selling.

Persuasion might be a more appropriate “P-word” than promotion in the 4Ps of Marketing—product, price, placement and promotion—yet persuasion connotes a more active approach to marketing than many of the critical tasks we engage in, including brand advertising, web-site development, branded content and even customer support, events, and conferences. In all of them we are advocating.

Let us suggest that despite all the arguments we have in the halls of our corporations or agencies about what type of tactical discipline works best, we are all in exactly the same business. If we are communicating with intent to persuade, then we are advocates in the field of Advocacy. Marketers are brand advocates. Advertising is one form of paid advocacy. There are others. What we are proposing is revolutionary.  It requires new language, or at the very least, the repurposing of better terms to describe what we do in this new hyper-communications age. We are all of us in the business of creating compelling messages that advocate successfully in the hearts and minds of our target audience for and in behalf of products, services, issues, ideals, ideologies, policies and individuals whom we find worthy of our best thinking and efforts.

Physics is struggling to find the holy grail — a T.O.E., a.k.a. theory of everything, or unified field theory. It is because they need to bring together the seemingly incompatible mathematics relativity and quantum mechanics. Our task as an industry is much easier than theirs. Think for just a moment about the fundamentals of our business. Wouldn’t you agree that there is no “line” above which or below which we work as communicators. There is only the goal—to persuade—and the work we do to achieve that goal, to advocate.

Advocacy – the most accurate word to describe what we do.

For those of us in the United States of America, adoption of the term “advocacy” to describe our business simplifies things. We need not change the name of AdAge, or the monikers by which our industry associations identify themselves. We simply evolve our language to keep pace with our times.  The 4As become the Association of American Advocacy Agencies, making public what we already know to be true, that they do web sites as well. (Gasp.) And public relations, demand generating FSIs, banners, direct mail, and email blasts as well.

Yes, advocacy has specific meaning in some countries. It is identified with Law. If we admit it, however, such association might do us credit. Corporate attorneys have more clout in the board room than marketers. If you agree that advertising might not be the most accurate term to describe the full depth and breadth of what we do as an industry then you’ll have to agree that no word in the English language more accurately represents us than advocacy.

Once that slight change in how you perceive our business takes place in your mind, you realize two things. First, that determining what you want people to believe, feel, and do and discovering the most compelling and effective way of persuading them is as important to your company as the other holy grail in our business, the creative.  Reasons, claims, and perceptions constitute what we want to “say.” Our creative teams determine how much attention people pay to these messages. Social media, television ads, public relations, web sites – these are simply the means by which we communicate all of the messages necessary to be successful marketers. Forrester, whom the AdAge article is referencing, is making a compelling point about the titles and responsibilities of those who are currently “brand managers.” What about taking it a step further? Most non-marketers in corporations struggle to clearly understand our discipline as it is. Let’s make it easier for them. We are all, not just brand managers, but advocates.

As many of you may have heard, the ANA conducted a survey in July of this year regarding formal agency performance evaluations conducted by marketers. An ANA news article posted on September 14th titled, “Majority of Marketers Conduct Formal Agency Performance Evaluations According to New ANA Survey” regarding the survey discusses the benefits of these evaluations. The two top benefits are identifying and improving under-performing agency relationships and identifying and recognizing the high-performing ones. A full report of the survey results will be presented at the ANA Agency/Client Forum on September 24th in New York City.

One aspect of the survey we found to be of particular interest is that the rising majority of firms are conducting 360-degree evaluations where the agency also evaluates the client. According to the ANA article, when conducted with a “trusted, neutral point person,” or third party, the performance evaluation is able to remain focused on real results like objectives and metrics instead of contesting personalities.

The 360-degree evaluations are vital to ensuring continuing performance on both sides of the relationship and the presence of a neutral mediator is vital to the success of the evaluation. It is important for the agency’s team is able to be open and honest about the input and direction they are receiving from the client without the fear of dire consequence and repercussion. The fear is understandable; who wants to bite the hand that feeds?

The presence of a mediator should naturally alleviate that fear by providing an unbiased view of the input and direction coming from the client and the resulting performance of the agency. This process provides viable solutions to existing problems instead of wasting time and resources to switch agencies, only to risk discovering the same problems again because the poor agency performance may have been a result of poor input and direction.

Performance relies on the quality of work delivered by both parties. The presence of a mediator can determine which party is ultimately responsible for the success or failure. Sometimes it’s the client, sometimes it’s the agency, and sometimes it’s both.

If you would like to read more on the ANA Survey, take a look at Jack Neff’s September 14th article titled, “ANA Survey: Agency-Performance Reviews Are Now Business as Usual” posted on AdAge.

Of course, at Jones&Bonevac we have a particular stake in this subject. We are, after all, consulting with a few very large brands on the subject of agency engagement. Not so surprisingly, we agree with the majority on this one. What do you think?

There have been many requests for the 2009 Client Input study referenced in the AdAge article written by Rupal Parekh titled, “Want More Out of Your Agencies? Write Better Briefs.” The report is now available here and will soon be available on our website at jonesandbonevac.com. Feel free to contribute to the conversation regarding the report in the comments section.

The State of Creative Briefs: Improving the way assignments are initiated in a $310 billion industry