Advertising works... kind of.
I was tickled by Paul Ashby’s forum thread on Brand Republic, stating that advertising works. If by “works” you mean wasting huge amounts of marketing budget and duping the customer into believing it is effective with ever having produced data to support the fact.
So why do firms still spend millions on advertising? I was party to a nugget of insight this week on a client trip to Paris. There’s not much to do on the Eurostar for two and a half hours, so the client was happy to chat about their recent marketing activities. It turns out that they’d just spent $800,000 on an airport advertising campaign. And the manager knew he’d get no tangible return on his spend.
Why would a sane person do this?
Here’s the reason. This firm, a large US-based technology firm, wants to increase its profile in Europe. Standard practice in these cases is for corporate HQ to dictate how and where European “satellite” operations spend their marketing budgets. Sometimes this centralized command-and-control process manages budget to the dollar.
So when corporate marketing offers $800,000 as long as it’s spent on marketing, what is a European marketing VP to do? Especially when they know that advertising will make little impact on sales.
This smart VP decides to advertise not where prospects might see the advert (because they’d tune it out anyway) but where his company colleagues and senior management would see it. If you work for a firm, then you tune in to its adverts, rather than tune them out (like prospects would).
The marketing VP then gets plaudits from his senior management for the high visibility. “You’re doing a great job – we saw the adverts in the airport.” This raised kudos allows the VP to attract more support for marketing and, importantly, more budget to do the things that he knows will actually affect sales.
So this VP is not insane after all – in fact he’s playing the game skilfully. But why do other people assume that advertising works? Perceived wisdom is defying hard facts – nobody can establish a link between advertising and sales. Is it the case that marketing is insane because everyone else is? And are marketers the only sane people around, but bound by the prevalent insanity to do daft things, like spend $800,000 on airport advertising?
So why do firms still spend millions on advertising? I was party to a nugget of insight this week on a client trip to Paris. There’s not much to do on the Eurostar for two and a half hours, so the client was happy to chat about their recent marketing activities. It turns out that they’d just spent $800,000 on an airport advertising campaign. And the manager knew he’d get no tangible return on his spend.
Why would a sane person do this?
Here’s the reason. This firm, a large US-based technology firm, wants to increase its profile in Europe. Standard practice in these cases is for corporate HQ to dictate how and where European “satellite” operations spend their marketing budgets. Sometimes this centralized command-and-control process manages budget to the dollar.
So when corporate marketing offers $800,000 as long as it’s spent on marketing, what is a European marketing VP to do? Especially when they know that advertising will make little impact on sales.
This smart VP decides to advertise not where prospects might see the advert (because they’d tune it out anyway) but where his company colleagues and senior management would see it. If you work for a firm, then you tune in to its adverts, rather than tune them out (like prospects would).
The marketing VP then gets plaudits from his senior management for the high visibility. “You’re doing a great job – we saw the adverts in the airport.” This raised kudos allows the VP to attract more support for marketing and, importantly, more budget to do the things that he knows will actually affect sales.
So this VP is not insane after all – in fact he’s playing the game skilfully. But why do other people assume that advertising works? Perceived wisdom is defying hard facts – nobody can establish a link between advertising and sales. Is it the case that marketing is insane because everyone else is? And are marketers the only sane people around, but bound by the prevalent insanity to do daft things, like spend $800,000 on airport advertising?
Labels: advertising, Marketing insanity
posted by Duncan Brown at 12:55 pm
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