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.

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.