Advertising Compensation and Benchmarking, Contract Compliance and Risk Assessments are vital services for large corporations with tens of millions, if not billions of dollars of marketing spend. Advertising Audit International (AAI) provides exactly these services to a broad range of Fortune 500 brands. Adding BriefLogic’s new “agency input audit” to the mix gives corporations a first-ever 360 degree view of their agency engagements.

In the complex and often confusing world of client-agency transactions, AAI’s standard review techniques are cost-effective methods to ensure the accurate and timely review of advertising costs and expenses. While most financial review firms, auditors and CPA firms typically use sampling techniques, AAI examines each individual invoice and its related line item costs for accuracy and contract compliance.

However, as AAI CEO Michael Lay states, “all of the costs we help recover for our clients, and it is a staggering figure, may be just the tip of the iceberg as we go to market with our new BriefLogic partnership.”

According to some industry analysts, total communications spend worldwide, across all marketing disciplines will exceed one trillion dollars in 2010. Currently, the corporate side of the industry is focused on the outcomes of that spend. Marketers are constantly interrogating the output of their agencies, their creative ideas, or the “stuff that sells.” According to co-founder and CEO, Casey Jones, BriefLogic has proved conclusively that someone has to think more deeply about the quality of the direction that sets these billions of dollars in motion. In a recent survey conducted by Greenberg Brand Strategies, it was determined that 30 percent of all agency time and energy is wasted or made inefficient due to poor input from marketing and brand managers.

Where AAI has experience in making sure that every single dollar that a marketer’s agency spends is accounted for, BriefLogic makes sure that it is directed properly at the front end of the process. AAI provides comprehensive audits of agency spend after-the-fact, and BriefLogic provides briefing tools, audit services, and agency input training to give marketers and agencies confidence that waste and inefficiency don’t occur on the input end.

Nice blog post from Media Asia – http://bit.ly/cuN8GH rating the joint BriefLogic/Microsoft bit at the ANA “one of the most introspective and interesting presentations” of the event. Great response in general from a lot of corporations attending the event, including General Mills, 3M and American Express. Thanks and compliments to co-presenter Bruno Gralpois of Microsoft.

To help you understand the concepts we are presenting here on this site and in our forthcoming book, please consider the following definition of ‘brand.’

A brand is the sum of perceptions any given individual or target audience has about the object you are striving to market.

These “objects” can be products, services, concepts, theories, ideologies, candidates, nations, institutions, or even yourself. For the moment, when we use the term ‘brand’ we mean “perception of a product” and when we use the term ‘product’ we mean all objects, services, concepts, ideas, ideologies, candidates, nations, institutions, etc., to which an audience can assign a label and which they perceive as having either a positive, negative or even uncertain value.

Brands can be influenced by marketers, but three things about them are vital to understand:

• A brand, your brand, is owned by your audience.  They determine its value. It lives in their hearts and minds and not, as many suppose, on a piece of paper in an office or an artistic rendition of your logo, company or product name. A brand name, like a logo, only means what you can persuade someone to believe, think, and feel about it. Names, like words and symbols, are carriers of meaning, containers for meaning, and proxies for the meaning that resides in an audience’s mind. You, your CEO, your fellow employees, and your board of directors are one audience that has some common agreement on what a brand means to them and how much they value it. That meaning is never the same as the audience perception.  Your relation to the object differs from that of the audience.  If you forget that, you’ll rue it later as you waste marketing spend.

• Pre-commoditization of your product category, the primary source of brand perception is the merit of the product. Does it deliver at above or below the expectation of the audience? David Ogilvy was on to something in talking about the brand as including “the nature of the product.”  There is often conflict between the different individuals and organizations who contribute to the development of a brand, i.e. marketers, brand managers, agencies, product engineers, designers, on the one hand, and line management on the other. Lack of clarity and agreement results in poor performance. Yet only after a brand becomes completely commoditized—only after there are a multitude of options, all of which deliver exactly the same functional and emotional benefits—does perception based on non-functional attributes alone become the primary driver of branding. Sheery’s “emotional, subjective” understanding of a brand makes sense only at that advanced stage, and takes for granted the understanding of the nature of the product that is the primary content of the brand at earlier stages.  Unless we as “brand” managers can understand and appreciate that our role is complementary to our teammates’ roles on the product side, we will be too blinded by our own brilliance and biased by our own bullshit to see the truth: that a brand is developed in an interdependent partnership with product development and that neither group alone can claim complete responsibility for its health, success or failure.

• Great brands are built by teams that include marketers. At times however, they are incidental to the effort. A marketer’s success is often assured by a great product. Since the human mind nearly always assumes that correlation equals causation, many “great” marketers have had their reputations made because of association with great products. The converse is also true. Marketers are often blamed for brand failure, when in fact the product itself has failed: failed to deliver equivalent or higher value than competing products or failure to be relevant in a world that has evolved beyond its need or usefulness.

A brand is made up of perceptions. A brand perception is any brand claim or promise held in the mind of the audience. The claim may be true or false and the promise may be real or hyperbole. In either case, it is the perception that determines individual or group reality. Perception then determines action, purchase, recommendation, etc.

But perception doesn’t float free from reality.  The nature and quality of the product matters.  Marketing isn’t magic.  If you want to pull a rabbit out of a hat, it helps to have a rabbit.

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.

This is  a re-post of an earlier blog lost during the design transition. If you have not read it already, please enjoy it for the first time. If you have already read it, take another look – you might find something new.

What Pulp Fiction Tells Us About Marketing

John Travolta, playing Vincent, and Samuel L. Jackson, as Jules, dressed in casual black suits, are standing in an apartment arguing with a drug dealer about money he owes their boss, Marsellus Wallace. They are affable but serious cold-blooded assassins and errand boys for Marsellus, completely in control of the situation—they think.  At the end of the scene, the dealer’s partner, nearly witless, bursts out of the apartment’s small bathroom and unloads an entire clip from his pistol at point-blank range. There’s a pause as Vincent and Jules consider their remarkably untouched state and the various holes in the apartment wall directly behind them. Then, at the same moment, they pull their own weapons from inside their jackets and blow the equally surprised drug dealer away. They don’t miss.

An unforgettable scene. An equally unforgettable lesson, if you happen to be engaged in a conflict of any kind, whether the weapons involved are semi-automatic pistols fired at short range or marketing campaigns fired with vastly greater expense at targets much, much farther away: Aim.  If you are going to be effective in the day-to-day war of marketing, you would be well advised to learn how to aim, especially in times of crisis, whether economic or personal.

This book is about aiming. The weapons we address here are the staff you entrust with the responsibility for determining what you will say to your marketplace, where you will say it, and how creatively it will be communicated. They are your weapons of mass persuasion. Your ammunition is your budget and your target is your competition.

The cost of ignorance or lack of training in the simple task of aiming is vast. It outweighs all the budget you will ever spend on head-count on your staff or fees paid to your agencies. For resources aimed poorly waste every creative and media dollar. They waste every word of copy and every photo shoot. They waste every page of print and every photon of light from a PC or cell phone screen.

You cannot afford to aim your marketing poorly. As fast as you fire or as much ammunition as you unload, there is always a Vincent and a Jules. They are studied, they understand the principles involved, and they can take down all your marketing and branding efforts with a few well-aimed shots.

Our goal is to develop the science of aiming your marketing and communications efforts. This book is about how your audiences form perceptions of your brand.  We will articulate the principles successful marketers have used mostly by instinct, but that you can with some study use thoughtfully to spend every dollar your company has entrusted to you more effectively.

Every business’s success depends on marketing its products. People can’t buy from you if they don’t know you exist. Businesses correspondingly spend billions of dollars each year on marketing. But the people involved in spending that money agree that most of it is wasted. To some extent, the problem is ineluctable.  Most of the people you reach aren’t going to become your customers.  John Wanamaker famously said, “Half the money I spend on advertising is wasted; the trouble is I don’t know which half.”  With the pace of media segmentation continuing to increase, Wanamaker may have underestimated. Marketing, and especially Advertising, is in a state of crisis

This is not news. What is news is the number of executives beginning to admit defeat. Those of us at industry conferences sit helpless as panels of experts fail to field questions from the audience. AdTech this year in San Francisco was perceived by many of us as a fiasco. Far too many speakers and panelists either could not or did not address the concerns of the attendees. Here’s our executive summary of the event:

Question: “What do we do about (insert issue here)?”
Chorus from the podium: “That’s really complicated.”

The problem is not evasion but confusion.  No one understands how to formulate strategies in a marketplace being fragmented and transformed by technological advances that multiply options and generate indecipherable masses of information.

What is the first and most significant outcome of all this confusion? Billions of dollars of waste. The systemic effects of that waste include

• Constant churn of corporation and agency executives and agency relationships.

• More shot-in-the-dark campaigns and tactics created and killed.

• A crisis in confidence in marketing, from the board room to the back room.

• CEOs unsure of their marketing staff.

• A marketing staff that has become less sure of themselves and their agency partners.

Common solutions include stop and start efforts; endless and confusing briefs and re-briefs; changes in direction; and vast and sweeping budget changes, not simply due to the current economic crisis, but because markers are less certain than ever whether any given direction will work. Another increasingly common response is sending more people to meetings—and all of us know how well that works out. What does it add up to? Wasted time and wasted operating expense resulting in lower profit margins, less revenue, darkness, chaos, running, screaming, and blood in the streets. Okay, perhaps not that grim, but grim nonetheless for an industry once welcome in the board room and once in competition for the hearts and minds of the best and brightest young minds graduating from the top universities in the world.

A not inconsequential effect is the money we spend on fees paid to agencies. The staff doing the work suffers, but pushback is not encouraged for two reasons. Saying “no” to clients can get you fired.  No one wants to be the one who convinces clients that someone else better understands their goals and needs.  Besides, confusion and complexity on the client side equals more billable hours and revenue for agencies.  Confusion generates work, and work generates income.

The results: Waste, waste, and more waste. More and more operating expense is wasted on agency hours to handle the increased workload, yielding often insane working conditions as the staff struggles to hang on, executing tactics under unreasonably mercurial conditions in our school-yard game of crack the whip.

Aimless Marketing

Ready, fire, ready, fire, ready, fire! If there is waste in marketing, it is reasonable to suggest that it begins with our aim: with our understanding of our target audience, what they want, and exactly what we should communicate to them to persuade them to believe in our positioning, adopt our point of view, love our brands, buy our products and services, and go on to convince their friends to do the same. We waste money on statements that are unnecessary or confusing. We waste money communicating claims and promises that are not relevant, do not make sense to our audience, or are seen by them to be a potpourri of disconnected messages that leave them without a discernible conclusion they can believe in.

Stop, just for a moment. Take the time to think deeply about what we have said and what we are about to say. Think very hard about the intersection of Communications as a discipline and Philosophy as it was originally conceived; philo, the love of, and sophia, wisdom. Look at our definitions and the model we construct from them and ask yourself whether this is not a better approach to marketing messaging than you, your company, or your industry currently uses.

A reasonable question to ask is, “Why should I believe thinking hard about this is worth my time and effort?” Here is one reason: We are offering you the first truly comprehensive framework for critical thinking and persuasion since the fall of the Roman Empire.  In the ancient world, great thinkers such as Aristotle and Cicero devised models of persuasion—models the details of which have largely been forgotten.  They did it for practical purposes.  They wanted to win cases in court.  They wanted to win votes in the Senate.  They wanted to convince people that they were right.  They wanted to get people to do things.  They were marketers—public relations officers—advertisers—advocates.  The models they built formed the foundation for educating people for a thousand years.

We propose to follow their example.  What is the wise course in any time of turmoil? Think. It is far more difficult than it sounds, but our minds remain the single most laborsaving tool we possess. The war on waste, which is, in effect, the war for marketing effectiveness, begins with a reassessment of where we spend our precious mental resources. Money is always in short supply. What do we do when budgets get squeezed? The traditional answer is “cut something.” But as Ernest Rutherford, the Nobel-prize-winning New Zealand chemist who laid the groundwork for nuclear physics, famously said, “We haven’t got the money, so we have to think!”  He later became an English Lord and then Baron. Lesson here? It pays to think.

Let’s ask the question: where can thinking get us? There are brilliant minds in our industry. They create brilliant campaigns, compelling communications plans, captivating creative. They write stunningly effective speeches, presentations, and press releases. They help Apple be Apple, Budweiser be the King of Beers, and Obama be Obama. And they are in short supply. As a wonderful woman in Austin said recently while awarding scholarships for C-students at a daughter’s high school, “very few of us are in the top 10 percent of the class. In fact seventy-five percent of us aren’t even in the top quarter!” How do we raise the bar for all of us whose profession is the art and science of persuasion?

-Casey C. Jones and Daniel Bonevac, Ph.D.

That which we can create and then market or communicate to others may be called products, services, ideas, ideologies, religions, or concepts. This category includes anything that can be created and to which we can attach a label. We can define these things universally as “objects.” They are different from and not to be confused with the concept of “brands” which are how each of these objects is perceived by its intended target audience. Brands are subjective. Objects are, naturally, objective.  -From the upcoming “Jones&Bonevac on Advocacy”