The Incompetence of General Ad Agencies
What Happened to the Final “A” in AIDA?
October 2007 By Denny Hatch
|
In the News
Counting More Than ClicksAs online advertising matures, so does the job of measuring results
Advertisers increasingly want more-detailed feedback on the effectiveness of their online marketing efforts, both to justify their increased spending on the Web and to help guide their future allocations across all available media. They want to know not only what ads consumers click on but also how those clicks translate into purchases. They are more focused on understanding how their mix of online marketing works together and how it fits into their broader marketing campaigns. They want to find out how online advertising is affecting the image of their brands, and how to target ads to specific audiences.
—Emily Steel, The Wall Street Journal, October 22, 2007
I have spent 45 years in the world of direct marketing, a discipline that is able to measure results down to a gnat’s eyebrow—whether it be mail, space. TV, radio, telephone or the Web. Our feedback comes directly from those to whom we advertise.
Yet the world of general agencies has somehow conned the dumb little yuppie MBA corporate brand managers into believing that it’s okay to spend millions and then rely on the analytics and electronics of third parties to guess whether the money is being well spent.
The situation is sick, sick, sick.
Meet Joan Manley
When Jerry Hardy founded Time-Life Books—turning the massive magazine archives into a magnificent publishing enterprise—his secretary, Joan Manley, was as brilliant as he was. When Hardy moved on, Manley took over as CEO.
Periodically Joan Manley would fly out to her Chicago distribution center and physically go through raw orders—hand-opening Business Reply Envelopes and seeing what they contained.
Manley knew she was not in retail with the luxury of face-to-face interaction with real customers. Hers was the business of manipulating people over long distances using paper.
Apart from random incoming and outgoing phone calls and letters of complaint, examining raw orders is the only way a direct marketer can be directly in touch with the customer.
The same principle holds today. The difference: electronics has replaced paper.
A Personal Aside
A number of years ago I attended Fundraising Day in New York where a guy from Father Flannigan’s Boys and Girls Town was a panelist. One of the mainstays of charity mail is the use of personalized address labels as the freemium (a free goodie in the outgoing envelope). When a consumer receives a sheet of personalized labels to use on the family’s outgoing mail, it lays on a guilt trip that results in a precisely measurable increase in contributions.
Boy’s Town Guy told us that his marketing people flatly refused to test these labels “because everybody was using them and they did not want to look like everybody else.”
One day, Boy’s Town Guy went into the mailroom and grabbed a bag of Business Reply Envelopes à La Joan Manley. To his astonishment, in the upper left corner of many of these BREs were personalized address labels sent out by competing charities. Clearly his donors had responded to this marketing technique by others.
Takeaway Points to Consider:
* “Half the money I spend on advertising is wasted. The trouble is I don’t know which half.”—John Wanamaker
* Web advertisers today don’t even know that.
* The answer: fire your incompetent general agency and hire on a direct marketer, who will put a system in place solidly based on measurable ROI rather than smoke and mirrors.
* When your Web ad features a hyper-link, make sure it does not go to a home page, but rather directly to a satellite page devoted to that specific offer or campaign.
* No offer, no response.
* “It’s the offer, stupid. If performance isn’t what it should be, check the offer first.”
—Bob Hacker
* “If you want to dramatically increase your response, dramatically improve your offer.”
—Axel Andersson
* Never forget AIDA:
-Attention
-Interest
-Decision
-Action
* Especially pay attention to the final “A”—Action. Otherwise your message will lay there like a lox.
* If you are not directly in touch with your market—and are making decisions based on gut instinct—you are throwing money down the sewer.
Web Sites Related to Today's Edition:
Vin Gupta’s salesgenie.com Super Bowl Ad, c/netNews.comhttp://tinyurl.com/2kfrw9
Vin Gupta’s salesgenie.com Super Bowl Ad
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ewt4gTtNOvE
2007 Super Bowl Ads Rated by USA Today
http://tinyurl.com/3cngpy
View All 2007 Super Bowl Ads
http://usatodayadmeter.feedroom.com/
“Counting More Than Clicks,” by Emily Steel, The Wall Street Journal
http://tinyurl.com/2jaz6z
“How Many Site Hits? Depends on Who’s Counting,” by Louise Story, The New York Times
http://tinyurl.com/3b2t3p
Companies Mentioned:
 |
|
|
|||
|
|
|
|||
|
|
|
