brand marketing

The evolution of the role of the marketer – and what that means for the future of the industry

November 16, 2018 22:24 Comments Off

The role of the marketer has changed almost unrecognisably over the last four decades. As technology has progressed and our tools have advanced, we have a greater understanding of our audiences and how our messages are landing with them. This can and does drive increased performance for both the media and, ultimately, the brand. However, it also adds many layers of complexity to the marketer’s role: today’s marketer not only needs to be able to tell great stories, they need to be able to understand data, numbers and technology – or surround themselves with people who do.

The 1980s: WHAT to say?

The 80s were perhaps the last time that advertising resembled the fabled ‘Mad Men’ era. In the ‘brand positioning’ decade, marketers had the freedom to be creative and tell stories that would catch the audience’s attention, cutting through the noise to drive loyalty and recognition. There were far fewer channels to orchestrate; TV ruled the day, with out of home and radio jostling for position as well. Direct marketing had started to emerge, but was in its infancy. Most importantly, communication largely ran one way – from brand to consumer – meaning that the brand, and the marketer, held the power over messaging and could decide whatstories to tell.

The 1990s: WHEN and WHERE to place ads?

The 1980s became the 1990s, which were something of a watershed moment for the advertising industry. Why? Because it was the decade that saw the very first digital advertising: US communications giant AT&T placed the first digital banner on hotwired.com – Wired Magazine’s online platform – in 1994. What’s more, the proliferation of cable TV and the increased length of ad breaks (up from nine minutes per hour to nineteen). The advertising landscape had become rapidly more complex, and the marketer’s role had changed forever.

This plethora of ad spaces had an important implication: it meant that the marketer could – and indeed needed to – optimise their media planning and buying strategies so that they were reaching their audiences in the optimal time and place. Whenandwhereto place ads were the key questions of the day: this meant adding more skills to the arsenal, such as the ability to understand and act upon ‘web analytics’ – the precursor to digital marketing optimisation.

The 2000s: HOW much?

If the 1990s was the birth of the digital advert, the 2000s were the decade that procurement-driven marketing was born. It was then that procurement processes were introduced to marketing, leading to increased control of – and therefore more focus on – pricing and effectiveness. This is undoubtedly intrinsically linked to the rise of the media buying houses – off-shoots from the creative agencies who were channelling their media planning and buying capabilities into separate entities. These entities would buy up huge amounts of inventory and sell it on to their clients, driving down prices. Procurement professionals were brought in to ensure that brands were getting the best deal from their agencies, resulting in pitches that were run on excel sheets rather than judged on relationships and strategy. The pressure on marketers and agencies to keep asking ‘howmuch?’ was intense, and has arguably not eased since.

The 2010s: WHO are we reaching?

The 2010s is the decade of the data-driven marketer. The most important marketing trends of the decade – data and technology – have transformed the practice of marketing. Modern tools allow marketers to understand their consumers like never before, optimising for their behaviour and preferences in real time and watching money come in in a way that is beyond the

80s marketer’s wildest dreams. However, it hasn’t all been positive: transparency has decreased, leading to a crisis of trust between brands and their agencies, and there are grave concerns around data ownership and regulation – as some of the tech giants have discovered to their detriment.

Who to reach – the individual – is now the priority, often at the expense of the mass-media, storytelling approach of the 1980s that built the strong brands of today. The focus has shifted to performance for each and every ad dollar and the cost per acquisition, rather than telling a brand story that leads to loyalty and trust. As we learned at the ANA Masters of Marketing conference last month, direct to consumer(DTC/D2C) brands are winning at the performance game, and more traditional brands can learn a lot from them. However, we mustn’t lose sight of the fact of the end destination – brand and business growth. Data and transparency are only the vehicles to get us there and are not the destination itself.

The 2020s: what should we be asking ourselves?

What does all this mean for the marketer as we approach the 2020s? Will there be a new paradigm? At ECI Media Management, we believe that marketers are now like the conductor of an orchestra: the instruments are in place, and the CMO is the conductor who is responsible for leading them to create the great symphony. An effective media strategy needs to ask ‘WHAT should we say?’, ‘WHERE and WHEN should we say it?’, ‘HOW much should it cost?’ and ‘WHO are we saying it to?’ in order to secure the highest ROI.

Marketers must define KPIs based on a clear marketing objective linked to business growth, so that all stakeholders, brand owners, media planners and buyers, procurement leads and tech and data experts share the same language and have one version of the truth to work towards. The theme of this year’s ANA Masters of Marketing was ‘driving growth’, and ANA CEO Bob Leodice, opened the conference with a rallying cry: it is within the power of CMOs to recover growth, particularly with so many tools, skills and technology at their fingertips. Harnessing the lessons of the last three decades – telling a brand story, optimising time and placement, achieving the best cost and using data to understand the consumer is surely the way to do this.

ECI Media Management can help marketers conduct the orchestra and position themselves for success. We forensically audit and benchmark all media activity, including (and uniquely) programmatic investments, to drive higher media value and increase the impact of media on business performance. As well as helping to manage media agency partners, we can offer advice to marketers looking to increase control by bringing more agency services in-house. Along with our other services– financial compliance audit, pitch management and contract consultancy – we can ensure that the modern marketer has all the tools at their disposal for success and growth in the 2020s and beyond.

Thumbnail image: Shutterstock

The effectiveness battle: performance marketing versus brand marketing

September 24, 2018 16:25 Comments Off

One of the key themes at DMEXCO earlier this month was the effectiveness of performance marketing versus brand marketing, and the related tension between offline and online marketing.

A trending topic

A week or so ago, ECI attended DMEXCO in Cologne, and there was a lot to take in from the 1000 exhibitors on over 100,000sqm of exhibition space! We shared our summary of what we learned straight after it finished, but there is one topic that particularly piqued our interest that we explore in more detail in this article. That topic? The trends and debate around the effectiveness of brand marketing compared to performance marketing and the related tension between offline and online advertising.

Short-term results versus long-term relationships

As online media generates a vastly larger amount of data than traditional media, and much more rapidly, it is tempting to find ways to obtain higher click and conversion rates from digital campaigns. Marketers and their bosses have always been under pressure to prove the impact of marketing and, ideally, to cut out the parts of a media plan that aren’t working as hard as others. Performance marketing is a relatively new term for short-term, sales-driving online marketing that often uses layers of data and targeting to ensure that as few impressions as possible are served to people who are unlikely to register a conversion that can be attributed to the campaign in question. Performance marketing therefore contrasts directly with traditional brand marketing, for which TV is still a key channel. Brand marketing techniques are the result of decades of academic research which have concluded that high brand equity – and resulting long-term sales growth – are the result of moderately frequent messaging that resonates thanks to evocative creative. Those fundamental truths have not changed with the invention of online media spaces. However, it might never be possible to prove a direct and independent cause-and-effect relationship between a specific ad impression and a sale. So while brand marketing is great for building consumer relationships, it’s difficult for any responsible marketer to turn down a form of marketing that actually has the word ‘performance’ in it!

The word on the street at DMEXCO

At DMEXCO, the advantages of both brand and performance marketing were covered in detail – with tools to support the latter dominating the exhibition floors of the expo, while the advantages of a more sustained brand marketing strategy were extolled on the stages of the conference. There has long been feisty and fascinating debate between marketers about which should be given the lion’s share of a marketer’s budget, especially their online media budget. At the DMEXCO debate entitled ‘How marketers can be enlightened, empowered and enabled in a mobile world’, the MMA’s Chris Babayode explained how conversion attribution modelling accentuates the tension between performance marketing (the champion of last touch attribution) and brand marketing (which looks better when using multiple touch attribution).

Last touch attribution of conversions for example is a common, simple method. It tends to demonstrate that methods such as search and retargeting generate a large number of conversions, leading many marketers to shift significant budget into these areas. Multiple touch attribution, on the other hand, recognizes that a click on a Google search link is not itself the cause of a conversion, and that various recent campaigns and on- and offline touchpoints should be taken into account. Multiple touch attribution can, for example, reveal what audiences and what sites will generate conversions further down the road.

Don’t pick sides

An interesting take on the debate appeared in an article by Mark Ritson in Marketing Week last month. It’s a well thought-through piece which we strongly recommend that any marketer

reads, but Ritson’s conclusion is that, in fact, marketers shouldn’t pick sides: the best way forward for your business in the long term and the short term is to keep up a traditional mix of more long-term branding and more short-term sales promotion. Ritson quotes Peter Field and Les Binet’s book The Long and Short of It: you want ‘60% of your budget invested in long-term brand building and 40% on more immediate activation’.

The effect of GDPR

It is interesting to see how the introduction of GDPR in the European Union has further blurred the line between the trackability of off- and online channels and therefore the distinction between which should be used for performance or brand marketing purposes. Many people have stopped allowing brands to track their data, meaning there is, and will continue to be, a large market for non-trackable impressions that are therefore similar to offline impressions. This shift in supply and demand is a huge, although likely temporary, opportunity. Several speakers at DMEXCO remarked on the drop in programmatic supply after GDPR was rolled out in May this year – despite the fact that media consumption of course didn’t drop. It’s all about choosing the right media for the right job – a truism that was illustrated perfectly by the exhibitors of some of the world’s most advanced ad tech companies using paper fliers for their marketing at DMEXCO!

Demonstrating how online can be an effective channel for brand marketing campaigns

An interesting case study into how effectively online platforms can be used for brand campaigns was highlighted in the YouTube-hosted event ‘How consumer choice has changed the video landscape’ by Johnson & Johnson’s Northern Europe Marketing Director Meghan Davis. She related the story of how J&J briefed a few different creative agencies to create an ad, independently of one another, using the same dental hygiene brief. All three resulting videos were then tested on YouTube and the one that performed the best was run on a wider scale. This brilliant campaign showcases how using quick-effect metrics and the flexibility of online media can improve the impact of a branding campaign across both online and offline; and demonstrates how live data can inform decisions to optimize a campaign and maximize its short- and long-term impact. We believe that this is an online strategy that could be adopted by more marketers looking at how online media can be leveraged for brand campaigns.

As is so often the case with advertising, the answer to the brand marketing versus performance marketing conundrum is not binary. The best results lie in achieving the right balance: as Ritson says, ‘a great brand plan will deliver short-term results within the year and set up longer-term, enduring advantage from stronger brand equity and improved funnel conversions. A great brand plan manages to hit short-term sales targets while also funding longer-term brand objectives that focus on brand health metrics.’ That means just the right mix of on- and offline channels, working in harmony to drive brand equity and meet sales targets. And to achieve that holy grail, robust strategies and creative messages and visuals that resonate, backed up with insight and measured with the right KPIs, are of critical importance.

To see how ECI can help you to obtain the perfect balance, contact us at value@ecimm.com.