Marketing Attribution: The next metric?

Marketing attribution: The next metric

Jon VanZile

September 17, 2012 - 6:01 am EDT

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Measuring ROI in today's multichannel marketing landscape has been a persistent thorn in marketers' sides.
When a team of 15 people makes dozens of marketing “touches” across a number of marketing tools for a potential customer, how do you determine which touch should get the ROI credit for the sale? And what about the ones you never saw, like when a CTO accessed your content from her tablet computer and never left any trace of her presence?
For a long time, according to Ruth P. Stevens, president of eMarketing Strategy, b2b marketers have settled on a simple solution to this problem: giving total ROI credit to the first marketing material the prospective customer touched, no matter what else happened on the way to the sale.
But those days might be past. Today, marketers are working on more responsive, nuanced ROI models. Call them “proxy metrics” or “marketing attribution,” the idea is the same—it's about changing the way marketers think about ROI.
Rob Cataford, VP-customer intelligence at BusinessOnline, gave a talk at SES San Francisco last month outlining a possible future with a new kind of ROI.
“A lot of people optimize their marketing campaigns on one metric, which is leads generated,” Cataford told StraightLine. “But we're saying that leads aren't good enough; we're saying you should develop a set of metrics based on the intent of the campaign. We're doing analysis around opportunity, not around individuals.”
The difference between these approaches is profound. Instead of tracking individuals and their lead-generation activity, Cataford said that many elements of a marketing campaign aren't even designed to directly generate leads, so it's useless to track them. Social media, for example, is a “nurturing” activity.
Social media is rarely how a customer is introduced to your product, but it's not uncommon for prospective customers to take to Twitter, your Facebook page or even a blog to get more information. The result is a bunch of activity sandwiched between the initiating contact—perhaps a white paper download or trade show appearance—and the final activity, such as filling out a contact request form. This activity has value, even if it doesn't directly generate a lead.
“So we've created different sets of metrics, like awareness metrics, nurturing metrics and action metrics,” he said. “Then we'll look at all of those with a single campaign and we can compare them each other. We might use unique visitors or time on site.”
One of the drawbacks to this kind of measurement, however, is the work required in the front end to develop the different kinds of metrics and weigh them appropriately.
“Buying is a process,” eMarketing Strategy's Stevens said. “So you have to dig into it. Where do you give the credit for the eventual action? The banner ad they clicked on, the invitation to a webinar or the tradeshow contact?”
Unfortunately for now, there still isn't an easy answer, but Cataford is sure of one thing: “This is better than just tracking leads.”

Source:
http://www.btobonline.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20120917/DIRECT11/309049992/1146/rss998&rssfeed=rss998
 

Analysis: Latin Culture as a major U.S. Economic Growth Driver

(From Portada’s Q3 2012 Issue)
The Spanish language and the Latin culture are enormous assets for the U.S. economy. In this regard, the U.S. marketing, media and cultural industries, have a lot to contribute to the mid and long term growth of the U.S. economy. For this reason, the cover article of this issue is devoted to the role of language in marketing to the U.S. Hispanic population.

Below are some thoughts on the current and future role that the Spanish-language and the Latin culture will play in the U.S.:

Mother Tongue and Foreign Tongue
Nevada, Colorado, Florida, Los Angeles, Santa Barbara…There are countless Spanish-derived names for U.S. cities and locations. In other words, Spanish has never been a foreign language in the U.S.

In fact, with the Guadalupe-Hidalgo Treaty (1848) between the United States and Mexico, more than half of the former Mexican territory, home to millions of Spanish-speakers, was given to the United States: That is no less than all or part of the territory of the following states: Texas, California, Nevada, Utah, Arizona, Kansas, Colorado, Wyoming, Oklahoma and New Mexico. And the number of Spanish-speakers has increased even more with the arrival of many millions of Mexicans and other Latin American immigrants. In the U.S., Spanish is both a mother tongue and a foreign language. That is what makes its role so important and interesting.

The Center of Gravity shifts toward the U.S.

As Eduardo Lago, a writer and former director of the Instituto Cervantes in New York says: “The Spanish language achieved its full potential when it crossed the Atlantic from Spain to the Americas and became the common language of 20 different Latin American states.” According to demographic forecasts, during this century the Hispanic population in the United States will get to be larger than the Spanish-speaking population in any other country of the world. (Currently Mexico holds the number one position with a Spanish-speaking population of 108 million.) In other words, during the next decades the center of gravity of the Spanish – language will shift northward to the U.S.

A homogenizing and strengthening effect

Another aspect that will strengthen the role of Spanish in the U.S. is that immigration has a homogenizing effect on the type of Spanish used in the U.S.
The Romance languages developed from Latin in the fifth to ninth centuries of the Christian calendar. The main Romance languages are Spanish, Portuguese, Romanian, Italian and French, but also Catalan, Galician, Sicilian and many others. In contrast to the way romance languages developed in Europe, where they grew out of the adaptation of Latin to very different and distant local cultures, different Latin American types of Spanish are now converging in a largely shared U.S. culture. The Spanish spoken in the U.S. will tend to be a mix of the different types of Spanish spoken in the immigrants’ home countries. It is likely that one type of Spanish, of course also integrating English words, will develop and prevail rather than many different types. It might be called a “pan Latin,” or more homogeneous variety of Spanish.

Spanish language and Latin culture
The above described demographic and linguistic trends will—and already are—making the United States a major promulgator of Latin culture (through media, entertainment, Language classes, etc), not only related to the Spanish-language but to Latin culture expressed in English. Tied with the enormous infrastructure of “cultural goods and services” existing in the U.S. (e.g. Film industry, Technological Infrastructure, Universities), the Spanish-language and Latin culture can make a major contribution to economic growth. Demand for “Latin Culture” is not only growing in the U.S. but also in fast growing Latin American countries and the Iberian Peninsula.

Source:
Portada. (2012) Retrieved from: http://www.portada-online.com/article.aspx?aid=9912

Top 100 Advertisers Boost Ad Spending but Not In Traditional Media

Increase of 4.8% is Fueled By Disciplines That Connect Directly With Customers

By: Bradley Johnson Bio

The nation's 100 biggest advertisers boosted 2011 total U.S. ad spending by 4.8%. But you wouldn't know spending was on the rise if you looked only at last year's measured media.

Click to view: Percent change in U.S. ad spending for 100 leading national advertisers

Check out the full LNA report and view 2012's Marketer Family Trees.

Measured spending for the top 100 actually slipped 0.2%. A double-digit measured-media gain for internet display spending and a small increase in TV did not make up for losses in newspapers, magazines and radio.
So where's the money going? Into unmeasured disciplines—a vast pool that includes various digital plays (search marketing, online video and some forms of social media), promotion and direct marketing. The appeal is clear: Marketers are putting money into disciplines that directly connect them with targeted consumers.
Advertisers are reshaping the media pie. Publicis Groupe's ZenithOptimedia expects the internet to surpass newspapers this year as the nation's second-largest advertising medium, behind TV. By ZenithOptimedia's tally, the internet was the fifth-largest ad medium until 2009, when it powered past magazines and radio into the No. 3 spot.
Nearly three-fourths of ZenithOptimedia's internet breakout comes from what Ad Age currently counts as unmeasured spending (including paid search, online video and mobile ads); the rest comes from measured disciplines (display advertising, including display ads on social-media sites).
Fortunes of unmeasured and measured disciplines have diverged since the Great Recession ended and not-so-great recovery began in June 2009.

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The top 100 U.S. advertisers in 2010 increased unmeasured spending by 12.6% and measured spending by 6.3%, resulting in an 8.8% rebound in total ad spending.
The 100 Leading National Advertisers' unmeasured spending jumped 11.8% in 2011 while measured media eased 0.2%, resulting in an overall increase of 4.8%. That slower growth shows how major marketers have kept a check on ad spending in this plodding economic recovery.
Measured media's share of LNA spending dropped to 55.8% in 2011 from 58.6% in 2010.
The tug of war between measured and unmeasured disciplines is hardly new. Since launching the 100 LNA report in 1956, Ad Age has used the term "unmeasured" to quantify ad and promotion spending distinct from media types -- such as TV, print and (in recent decades) internet display -- that are measured by tracking services.
The shift in 2011 was widespread: 100 Leading National Advertisers in all but two major industry categories reduced the portion of 2011 spending that went to measured media, according to Ad Age DataCenter's analysis. (The two exceptions were financial services and restaurants, where measured media scored a bigger slice of the pie.)
Case in point: Kohl's Corp., the department-store retailer, disclosed gross advertising costs rose 10.4% to $1.123 billion in 2011. Kohl's 2011 measured-media ad spending declined 2.5% to $331.3 million, according to WPP's Kantar Media. Ad Age defines the difference as unmeasured spending: $791.7 million, up 16.9%.
To be sure, marketers still rely on measured media to build brands and promote products. Apple's U.S. measured spending surged 82%.
The 100 LNA accounted for 44% of Kantar Media's 2011 U.S. measured-media spending.
Among the 100 largest advertisers, total 2011 U.S. spending (measured media plus unmeasured spending) increased in all but three major industries, according to Ad Age DataCenter's spending analysis.
Telecom had the sharpest spending drop, falling 7.9%. AT&T, Deutsche Telekom's T-Mobile, Sprint Nextel Corp.and Verizon Communications all cut measured-media spending.
Marketers of cleaning products reduced total ad spending by 3.3%. The LNA's 10 food companies trimmed spending by 1.5%.
Two major industries saw double-digit increases in total U.S. ad spending: automotive, up 16.1%, and financial services, up 11.2%.

Ad Age DataCenter estimates

During the 2007-2009 recession, automotive and financial-services imploded as industries and ad categories. But the two industries have rebounded sharply, scoring double-digit ad spending increases in both 2010 and 2011.

Fiat's Chrysler Group boosted U.S. measured-media spending by 48%; Chrysler's stated worldwide ad spending jumped 49%.

Estimated total U.S. ad spending for JPMorgan Chase & Co., the largest financial advertiser, rose 22%. JPMorgan Chase's stated worldwide marketing costs in 2011 were 77% above the company's recession-period low (2009).

Among the 100 LNA, about two-thirds of marketers increased U.S. spending in 2011, with 32 cutting spending, according to Ad Age DataCenter's analysis.

What about 2012? Kantar Media last week reported some sign of a modest rebound in measured-media spending. Overall U.S. measured spending increased 2.6% in the first quarter, the best quarterly growth since second-quarter 2011.

Kantar Media's top 100 marketers increased first-quarter 2012 spending by 3.4%, vs. a 0.2% spending decline in full-year 2011.

ZenithOptimedia forecasts total U.S. spending for major media and marketing services will grow 3.2% in 2012 and another 3.2% in 2013, up from 2011's tepid 1.8% growth. That hardly signals a boom. But it's better than a bust.

Source:
Advertising Age.
http://adage.com/