marketing measurement

Golf training-aid brand PureOne improved sales by rethinking how it measures marketing performance and by shifting ad spend toward new customers.

For most of the last decade, performance marketing was rewarded for momentum. Spend efficiently. Scale quickly. Optimize continuously. If the line went up and to the right, few questions followed. But that era is ending, because performance without accountability is no longer credible.

As artificial intelligence transforms advertising analytics, many organizations are rushing to adopt AI tools, hoping for a “magic button” that instantly democratizes data access.

Marketing often gets unfairly pegged as a cost center. But that wouldn’t happen if marketers had access to better measurement that gave them clarity on what truly drives business growth, argues Henry Innis, CEO and co-founder of MMM platform Mutinex.

As the newly appointed CMO of Genesis Motor America, it’s Amy Marentic’s job to raise awareness for the luxury auto brand, which is fighting for market share against more well-known incumbents in the US market. To do it, she’s analyzing the data and working on a growth strategy to reach a largely untapped demo: women. Plus: Marentic’s unique origin story, from astronaut hopeful to chief marketer.

Marketing measurement is broken, and everyone knows it. Every week, I talk to marketing leaders who are desperate to quantify the revenue that marketing is incrementally delivering to the business. Many of them have some kind of marketing mix model (MMM) in place, yet still rely almost exclusively on last-touch attribution (LTA) to optimize their marketing investments on a daily, weekly and monthly basis.

With a growing array of platforms and channels competing for consumer attention, advertisers have been increasingly looking for ways to understand which ads and placements drive engagement and sales – not just engagement and sales that would have happened anyway but true incrementality.

Marketing measurement is messed up – it’s hard to argue otherwise – and most people agree on the reasons why: vanity metrics, imperfect models, unrealistic expectations. But there’s another issue at play, argues Julian Runge, an assistant professor of marketing at Northwestern University – and that’s a simple lack of communication.

Dividing brand and performance makes sense as long as the two sides collaborate closely, says Jennifer Burch, Hasbro’s senior director of global media.

Yes, the headwinds are blowing for digital advertising. There’s signal loss, regulatory scrutiny, platform privacy changes and a looming recession, to name a few. But McKinsey Partner Emily Del Greco sees opportunity on the horizon for commerce media and new forms of measurement.

Over the past two years, Qualcomm has restructured its marketing organization to position it as a business driver more directly tied to results. Here’s how.

“Data-Driven Thinking” is written by members of the media community and contains fresh ideas on the digital revolution in media. Today’s column is written by Matt Voda, CEO of OptiMine Software. There’s no denying that we’re living in a period of massive disruption to the way in which data is used for marketing. Cookies are (finally) […]

“On TV And Video” is a column exploring opportunities and challenges in advanced TV and video.  Today’s column is written by Ken Archer, vice president of product at Survata. As a marketer, it’s often difficult to know how to respond to 5G hype and provide guidance internally so you’re not caught flat-footed. So many 5G predictions […]