Magnosticism

An article I wrote for MarketingNPV Journal is posted here (registration required). Here’s the top: 

There’s no longer much of an argument over the need to measure marketing performance. Face it, the left-brainers have won at least the battle, if not the war. But just how are CMOs faring with their new measurement-driven agendas?

The short answer is: So far, so good. Marketing leaders point to more focused initiatives, a better handle on their investments, even improved relations with an old nemesis — finance — as a result of their marketing dashboard initiatives. But they also admit that there’s still much work to do, not just with what they’re measuring, but also in how they’re sharing those results with the rest of the organization.

Eight senior marketing executives shared their insights with me for the article: Yahoo’s Cammie Dunaway and Nick Besbeas, Home Depot’s Roger Adams, Office Depot’s Tony Ueber, KeyCorp’s Karen Haefling, Lenovo’s David Churbuck, Bank of America’s Bob Calamari, and CA’s Sean Goldstein. They discussed the makeup of the dashboards and, as imporantly, how they’re distributing that information across their companies. Money quote from Haefling, KeyCorp’s CMO, about the types of metrics to include in a marketing dashboard:

“We have learned that less is more. You need to focus on the things that are really going to make a difference in company performance, and not bean-count all the things that show you’re doing a nice job.” 

Successful marketing organizations are using their dashboards to improve their ability to make resource adjustments on the fly, as this example from Bank of America shows:

Through its performance measurement systems, BofA’s marketing team can gain greater insight, for example, in the effectiveness of TV vs. out-of-home advertising for a product campaign and make adjustments quickly toward the media that are proving more valuable.

“We’re getting more sophisticated around marketing-mix modeling and our ability to optimize various elements of marketing spend,” says Calamari. “That has opened up a whole world of possibilities to experiment with more refined degrees of spending.”

MarketingNPV’s managing partners, Pat LaPointe and Dave Reibstein, must have liked the article, because they just hired me as editor of their quarterly journal and website. I’ll still be blogging here and doing other project work, but I look forward to digging into the issues of marketing measurement and accountability that MarketingNPV addresses so well.