A new book that will be published next month shows up to 1/3 of all advertising spend is wasted money.  The findings of ‘What Sticks‘ are the result of five years of research on campaigns from 36 of the nation’s top advertisers.

"….The book is something of a marketing 12-step program for Mr. Stuart, who in a footnote actually apologizes to each of his clients from that era by corporate name, including American Express, PepsiCo’s Frito-Lay, Apple and Sears. "

"….Contained in the book’s initial chapters are some remarkable revelations, including the allegation that two of the Big Three automakers used to base their annual media budgets on one another’s prior-year measured-media spending. The authors discovered that many longstanding axioms of media planning were based on nothing more than hunch and legend. They reveal how frequently marketers disregard research when it doesn’t jibe with their own opinions — or seek out research that does.

When the authors presented their findings to one automaker’s marketing team, according to the book, the company’s research people said: "We don’t believe anything our agency brings to us, this study included."

"…….It pins much of the blame for marketing’s woes on marketers and their failure to even define success for campaigns at the outset — much less measure it properly on the back end. Of the 36 marketers the authors researched, only two — P&G and Cingular — had a clear definition of success for each marketing effort at the outset, Mr. Briggs said in an interview. "

That’s not surprising to me - most of my clients don’t have a measure for what is success either.  In fact, it’s not that easy to define success for online marketing, in particular, because you have to start with realistic expectations (in the first place) and in order to do that, you have to do a bit of research to see what kind of response your marketing (and competitors) typically draws - and who has time for that?  In some cases, I bet the advertising / marketing departments don’t even want to know the answer (even if they could know it).

"No one ever got fired for using television," the book says, citing an internal J&J adage — one that appears to have become outmoded of late as the company, since its work with Marketing Evolution, has increasingly branched into new media and creative approaches, not to mention that J&J sat out this year’s upfront.

"The authors cite fear of failure — and firing — as possibly the biggest problem for marketers seeking to improve ROI. The core of the book is a description of and entreaty for a "commercial optimization process" covering messaging strategy, creative and media planning — a sort of Six Sigma for marketing. But like any continuous improvement program, it requires analysis of failure, which has become almost impossible for some to admit for fear they’ll be fired. "

 

I find this all the time - people are committed to un-realistic expectations because they don’t have a real idea of what’s normal to expect.   One of my clients runs advertising that will perform differently depending on where it’s shown and how often it’s shown (weeks it’s left to run).  Amazingly, no metrics, no measurement process was taking that into account in evaluating success for that advertising.   

I just ordered the book on Amazon, and hopefully I’ll be one of the first to receive it and can review it in more detail on Webmetricsguru.com.