“We’re not growing enough.”
For me, those were the four most important words from the now-landmark keynote presentation by P&G’s Chief Brand Officer Marc Pritchard at the IAB Annual Leadership Meeting this past January.
Pritchard, representing the largest advertiser in the world, went on to highlight that despite marketers spending an astounding $200-plus billion in advertising and $1 trillion in total marketing spending, the growth rate of our collective industries is an anemic 2 percent. You don’t need to be Warren Buffett to know that’s a pretty horrible return on investment.
This is a problem for everyone involved in the ecosystem. And the first step in the path to recovery is candidly diagnosing the problem.
It’s clear that marketers are suffering from PTSOD (post-traumatic shiny object disorder), developed after experiencing too many PowerPoint presentations from ad-tech, mar-tech, whatever-tech companies promising the holy grail of the “right message to the right person at the right time.” Becoming distracted by the shiny objects took our eye off the ball. We forgot to focus on what matters.
This is why ANA CEO Bob Liodice gave a rallying cry at last October’s Masters of Marketing Conference to “Take Our Industry Back.” He helped put things into perspective again. “Marketers are beginning to rediscover their primary role, which is driving business growth.” The ANA and its board of directors have established an agenda for CMOs to lead the industry’s growth agenda and use the enormous clout brands have through the collective “power of the purse.”
So how are you driving growth for your business? Here are a few tips to make sure you can focus on what matters:
No more buzzwords
Our industry is notorious for hopping on the bandwagon of buzzwords. It reminds me of the hilarious Kevin Kallaugher Economist cartoon about stockbrokers, where one says the word “excel,” another hears “sell” and then everyone yells “sell” until one person says “good bye,” another hears “buy” and then everyone screams “buy.”
Sound familiar? We need programmatic. We need native. We need big data. All of the sudden, these buzzwords have popped up in everyone’s vernacular. While new tech is important, we’re getting caught up in the means to the end, not the end itself. I know one CMO (name withheld to protect the guilty) who was very excited to share with his CEO that they were working with an ad-tech vendor to do “people-based marketing.” The CEO’s response? “What? Well, who the hell have you been marketing to all this time?” And we wonder why CEOs and CFOs don’t value marketing as much as they should.
Shut out the noise, focus on the signal
If you are driving business growth, are you focused on the signals that matter to your business? As the saying goes, “Not everything that counts can be counted, and not everything that can be counted counts.”
Too often marketers get caught up in media metrics. Are you only focused on GRPs and CTRs? Media metrics are one of several variables that need to be considered in your growth equation. Brand metrics like market share and penetration growth matter. Financial metrics like EBITDA margins and customer lifetime value matter. Have a basket of core metrics from all the key drivers of your business. It’s not all about media.
Be an investor, not a buyer
While brands are now looking to create their own data lake (note: buzzword alert), in reality they are drowning in a data swamp. Everyone has an audience to sell you. And that’s great since we have shifted from media planning and buying to audience planning and buying. But don’t just be a buyer. Be an investor. Instead of buying an audience, why not build an asset?
One of the best assets a marketer can build is its own customer graph (something we recently discussed in-depth during an Adweek webinar). Data does not equal identity. A cookie isn’t a customer. An email address isn’t a customer. These are just data elements. Instead of using a vendor’s graph (who’s just trying to sell you more of these data elements) at the center, why not put your customer at the center? Design an identity strategy built on trust that will wire first-, second- and third-party data together to build your own customer graph.
Your customer graph now becomes a business asset that you are investing in, connecting the online world with the offline world where the majority of most brands’ sales take place. You get to build an asset that will add value to other areas of the business beyond marketing, like customer service and product development. You get to understand how to connect all touchpoints across people, places and things.
See the big picture
The role of marketing has its own marketing problem. It’s common for CEOs and CFOs to view the marketing team as a cost center. However, times are changing. We’re experiencing the most powerful trend since the industrial revolution—the emergence of the connected world.
As online and offline become connected, so will everything else, from products and services to communications and commerce. The marketing teams at every company have an incredible opportunity to help navigate this connected world. Every brand, business and industry will be transformed by the power of connection. Are you prepared for the new opportunities of the connected world? Are you prepared for the new challenges of everything being connected? You will increasingly need to widen the aperture and understand how everything from security to IoT will impact your brand, your business and most importantly, your customers. Remember, a data breach is a brand breach. By seeing the bigger picture, you can focus on building the right assets that will drive business growth in the connected world.
Now is the time for marketing to re-invent itself from a cost center to a profit center. Making marketing the growth engine for your company is by far the best investment you can make.
