Math Marketing
I recently came across the following quote from Carla Hendra, CEO of Ogilvy & Mather North America: “CMOs are under increasing pressure to deliver business results and to demonstrate the contribution that marketing makes to their organization. The days of guess work and soft metrics are over — Math Marketing is the future.”
A couple of reactions to the quote:
First, not everything is measurable. Love isn’t, apathy isn’t – just to name two.
Second, trends can’t always be predicted, and needs can’t always be anticipated, based upon what currently exists and is measurable.
I have no issue with being accountable. But I do have an issue with fear (in the guise of accountability) killing creativity. That would be a little like agency creatives only developing ads to beat the norms in copy testing; this has only ever produced average or slightly above average ads. I’m convinced that the original Apple “1984″ ad would not have tested well to norms.
I would really dislike seeing CMOs turn into “CFOs in new clothes.” I do understand the digital environment affords marketers more avenues for reaching micro-targets, and I think it and its arsenal of new tools is a wonderful thing. My primary concern is that the more CMOs are into the numbers, the greater the risk they won’t see the complexity of the people they’re trying to reach.
Early in my career, while working at Foote, Cone & Belding, I was called to jury duty in downtown Los Angeles. The case took several days and I got to know some of my fellow jurors. One – I can still see him to this day – was an African American man, about 60 years of age, who very tall and thin, and had spent his working career as a highway-sign laminator (and eventually supervisor) for the state. He had six grown children, all of whom he’d put through college; he himself hadn’t finished high school. To this day, he remains one of the wisest men I’ve ever met. Demographically, he was easy to categorize: older, less-well educated, African American male. Yet, even at 24, I knew that I had learned a life-long lesson from him: if I’d only seen him demographically, from my ivory tower, I would have missed the richness of his life and what I could learn from him.
Ultimately, what we learn when in relationships (yes, even with customers), makes for stronger relationships. My hope is that Math Marketing doesn’t leave the consumer too far removed from the equation.
Your thoughts?
Tags: Marketing, Math Marketing, Trends
Aug 27, 2009
Hiya! I guess i’m really quantitative because i think EVERYTHING can be measured. You just have to figure out how. Love can be measured by number of hugs, intensity of hugs, frequency of hugs, length of hugs. Change the word hugs with kisses, phone calls, donations, volunteered hours, and you have another ton of measures.
But I do get your point!
Aug 28, 2009
In Math marketing you have raised an important issue. There is already a sense of unease about excessive reliance on performance metric based on advance analytics.
The two important issues that I see are as below
Theoretical foundations
We must first of all realize that we are dealing with Social science which is still an evolving discipline. The recent emergence of Behavioral Economics is challanging the very foundations of classical and neo classical economic theories. Any measurement amd modeling based on excessive reliance on assumptions of rationality are likely to be of questionable robustness.
Analytics
The monumental computing power unleashed by modern computers has proliferated use of Statistics and Econometrics often at the cost of wisdom and technical discretion. The professionals have perpetuated an aura of mysticism around these technique in their obvious self interest, so much so that anything that has been churned out of a complex model has acquired status of an universal truth and a “nice excuse” for risk aversion in managerial decision making.
In that sense Math Marketing is a case of pendulum swinging to other extreme of “What cannot be measured , cannot be managed” approach.
Aug 28, 2009
The biggest takeaway I have here is this- people are valuable, intrinsically as the Highway sign laminator was. And I love this story for the humaness of it.
Every person on the other side of that Ad spend is a real person.
This is critical to support. What we miss when we assign a number to a feeling lessens it’s experience, but we have to have some measure of impact (sales) for our advertising or we can’t justify the ad spend and out jobs are going to be in danger.
This is one of the big lessons of social media. You are connecting with them at an activity they choose to do.
If you remove the end user from the equation you are going to struggle with your advertising because you are not addressing who is actually going to be casting their increasingly valuable dollar vote for your product.