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

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.

The January 15, 2010  issue of The Week published an excerpt from a book titled, The Checklist Manifesto, by Atul Gawande. He is a surgeon by trade and found that in his profession human error would be avoided by a simple solution: checklists. He ends the article by saying medicine isn’t the only field where checklists will help but that: “There may be no field or profession where checklists wouldn’t be tremendously beneficial.”

We at Jones&Bonevac feel the same way, particularly about how checklists can improve marketing efficiency. If you read the article, you’ll notice Dr. Gawande describes the process of building a skyscraper. The 32-story office and apartment complex he visited was being raised by the hands and minds of 250 individuals working at the site. Each person was responsible for tasks that determined whether or not the building would stand or fall. Building a successful marketing campaign is no different than building a skyscraper. Each person, whether on the client side or on the agency side needs to be sure to perform their task the right way at the right time in order for the project to succeed.

With a checklist, one can only imagine how much more efficiently and effectively a marketing communications plan would come together. So much time and effort would be saved, so many dollars and resources would not be wasted, if only marketing and advertising employed the use of  a simple checklist.

Dr. Gawande states a theory in his book. He says: “Under conditions of complexity, not only are checklists a help, they are required for success.” If you know anything about marketing and advertising you will agree it is absolutely a complex process.

Now put your pen to paper and draw a small box in the upper left hand corner and write next to it, email info@jonesandbonevac to learn how to further improve marketing efficiency.