Marketing measurement is often messed up for reasons that have been written about ad nauseam: an overreliance on imperfect models and vanity metrics, a lack of true experimentation and unrealistic expectations about precision.
But there’s another, more prosaic reason why marketers often fail to embrace a better, more rigorous approach to measurement – and that’s a simple lack of communication, says Julian Runge, a behavioral economist, researcher and assistant professor of marketing at Northwestern University, on this week’s episode of AdExchanger Talks.
For example, an internal divide commonly exists between the data science folks – the ones with the statistical knowhow – and the executive team that sets the strategies and allocates the marketing budgets.
It may sound trivial, Runge says, but without a blessing from the leadership, any initiative to improve an organization’s approach to measurement is bound to fail.
“You want an executive who actually sponsors this initiative,” Runge says. Otherwise, “it’s unlikely that somebody on the more tactical level will be able to get across to the higher-ups how effective a medium is.”
It’s that classic tale yet again of needing to break down silos. But integrating experimentation into marketing measurement also means getting comfortable with being uncomfortable.
The marketing organization will need to adopt a “culture of failure,” Runge says, where it’s okay to learn from mistakes and executives don’t jump to premature conclusions.
“You often need to rerun experiments because experiments aren’t perfect,” Runge says. “There can be interference, there can be dynamic effects over time, and you want to run several experiments before you can really call something.”
In other words, be patient and have an open mind – oh, and don’t forget to talk to the media buyers. They’re in the trenches every day.
“Ask them, ‘Hey, what do you think?’” Runge says. “‘Where do we have the biggest misconceptions in terms of the effectiveness of one of our advertising channels?’ Then work to set up a measurement plan, including several experiments for this medium, to know what it really does and see if it aligns with the outputs of the central analytics.”
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“That,” Runge says, “is one very concrete way to get this started.”
Also in this episode: Why advertisers need to finally wake up and embrace gaming as a highly effective marketing medium, media mix modeling (is it good, bad or ugly?) and how many steps Runge walks a day (it’s a lot).
For more articles featuring Julian Runge, click here.
