Smart KPIs: Accountability Over Outcomes Over Activity.
A couple of years ago, I was doing a Strategic Consulting engagement for a global company that operates in 75 countries. The scope was to build out a Marketing strategy for the next generation of success. I was immensely grateful for this fun and deeply challenging opportunity. In an early meeting with a sub team, they shared that the primary success of their Marketing campaign was the metric Cost Per Session. I’d never heard of it. In. My. Life. And, I had a couple of decades of experience. I’d worked with the largest companies on the planet. I’d authored two bestselling books on Analytics, in multiple languages. I’d helped invent entirely new Analytics tools!! The only CPS I knew was Cost Per Sale. Now, there are plenty of poor metrics. Take Impressions & Views. They are so value deficient, I would call them “things” and not metrics. [TMAI Premium Subscribers: Please review the invaluable guidance in TMAI #459, #460: Impressions Suck! If you can’t find them, please email me.] Still, Cost Per Session surprised me by its existence because I could not believe anyone would consider that as the end point of what their job was in Marketing. Just shovel traffic, and do it as cheaply as possible? ☹️ Pause. Deep breath. I’m going to come back to Cost Per Session. If you’re in a gun to your head type situation, I’ll share what you can measure instead to suck less. Even more valuable, I’ll share why as Google heads to AI Mode, a focus on Cost Per Session will harm your company exponentially more. This blog post was published as Premium edition #463 of my newsletter. Each week, I share actionable insights and hidden patterns to stay at the bleeding edge of Marketing, Analytics, and AI. Sign up for TMAI Premium to accelerate your career trajectory. Outcomes Over Activity. My objective is to protect the CMO from the CFO. As in, ensure that the client is executing a marketing strategy aligned with the awesome vision of the CMO, AND that all that activity is producing results that can withstand a CFO’s strict scrutiny. This turns out to be a bit of a pain for the CMO, as it forces a bit more discipline than they might prefer and a bit more accountability on the marketing organization than they prefer. After a period of adaptation, this pays off handsomely by identifying the incremental business impact of marketing to the CFO. Quickly followed by ever-increasing marketing budgets. A real-life case study of that shift in emphasis. The most common reports floating around your company likely look something like this: Google Advantage+, OMG, YES! Way to go!! Na na na na Email. Sucks to be you!! Sorry. What I mean is Google Advantage+ does a better job of eliciting a higher response rate. We celebrate this. We ship more budget to Mountain Park. If you have an engaged CFO, or legacy-minded CMO, she/he would ask what the outcomes were from the activity above. No biggie, we add our normal favorites like Revenue and Conversion Rate and share: Google Advantage+ delivers. More Orders. More Revenue. Joy! When you are assessing the impact of your Owned, Earned, and Paid marketing efforts, at the very minimum, go all the way to Outcomes. I know that sometimes this is hard because you are a B2B company, or you are a B2C company with a longer sales cycle, or you are a pharma company where the Outcome is a doctor writing a prescription. I still encourage you to go to Outcomes. In all of these cases you can either track the direct site Outcome or you can measure a Micro-Conversion and times it by an Average Lead to Offline Conversion Rate and Average Outcome Value and get a working set of numbers. These might only be 85% accurate, but they are a heck of a lot better than just looking at the Activity! Now… If you have a CFO who truly cares about Marketing, they will want to fund Marketing to the max. But, they have to look across all company opportunities (Stores, Support, Product, Eng etc.). Hence, she will ask you for one more thing. Accountability Over Outcomes. All of that Marketing was not free. Google Advantage+ costs you money. Email costs you money. Start by collecting those inputs. I recommend Campaign Cost and Cost of Goods Sold (what it cost you to make the products your marketing sold). Here’s that lovely picture. It is not surprising that Google Advantage+ costs more. We want to understand COGS – you can do actual or apply an average percentage across products, none of this will be reported to the SEC and hence good enough is good enough. Once you have the two inputs into Marketing, you are ready for the Accountability view. $17k in Revenue minus $7k in Campaign Costs minus the Cost of Goods Sold gives you a Profit from Google Advantage+ AI-powered campaigns of $5k. You can choose the level of accountability you want to demonstrate to your Marketing Loving CFO. If you want less CFO love/budget, you can use Return on Ad Spend (ROAS). [Note: TMAI Premium Members, review TMAI #455: Minimum Acceptable ROAS? 8. It will change your Performance Marketing strategy forever.] The tables now flip. Google A+ at 2.4 looks significantly worse than Email at 9.6 ROAS. A different view from both Activity AND Outcomes. Depending on your company culture: Earning you instant gratitude and thanks from the Paid Media team OR the Paid Media team becoming defensive and… ROAS gives Marketing full credit for Revenue by not accounting for Campaign Cost (ad spend). Hence, it vastly inflates Marketing’s impact. A smart CFO will see through this. My recommendation: At least aim for CFO like (if not love). You can do that by computing Return on Investment (ROI). It subtracts from the Marketing’s claimed Revenue the Campaign Cost. The tables continue to flip. Google A+ has a big percentage drop to 1.4 and Email has a smaller percentage drop to 8.6. Don’t stop the accountability train. Aim for CFO love! Compute Profit on Ad Spend (POAS). You can see the formula above. You are now actively losing money on Google Advantage+. For every $1 you send to Google, they send you $0.70 of Profit back. You are not going to believe it; this is not the end of the story. That comes by holding Marketing to account for the budget, and calculating Profit On Investment (POI). Time to cry. For every $1 you are sending to Google, your campaign is sending back a negative $0.30. Essentially, if this was your data, you exist to provide employment to Google’s Advertising Sales team. Email delivers a profit of $4.7 for every $1 in spend. Does it matter that your Revenue from Google A+ was 12x higher than Email? This is why every CMO who wants to grow Marketing budgets YOY, every CFO who truly loves Marketing demands their team measure Accountability over Activity. Here’s the complete picture: You’ll use the above to make decisions. You’ll expect your Agency to use the above picture, and more (!), to make decisions on your behalf to drive ever higher POI. Your VPs of Global Marketing, your CFO, receives something much simpler: If your company culture is against calculating POI, my recommended Priority 1 (P1), you can use POAS (P2). If the culture rebels against Profit or there is simply no way you can calculate it, go one step higher to ROI (P3). Don’t lower your standards and measure ROAS (but, if you do, the formula is above). Action: Should You Cut Google Advantage+ Budget? Yes. The results clearly illuminate that the way you are spending money on Google (or Meta) you need to immediately stop. In fact, with such poor POI, you should have never started. Yet. Recognize that Email only brought you 14 Orders, vs. 173 from Google Advantage+. Sure. You lost a lot of Profit on every one of those 173 orders. But there is the promise of scale. Google and Meta are successful businesses. They are built primarily on Advertising Sales. That means countless companies are getting high green POI. In this instance, chances are the problem is you, and not the platform. My recommendation: Step 1: Cut your Google/Meta spend to zero immediately. Send a message, it is not ok to be the giant sucking sound on company Profit. Pause a week, a month. Let the message sink in. It won’t be easy, there will be massive alarm bells that TRAFFIC IS DROPPING, REVENUE IS DISAPPEARING. Remind everyone, Profit is having a positive recovery at the same time. Step 2: Offer your internal Paid Media team, your external Agency (if you have one), and your Meta/Google Sales team (if you have one), an opportunity to deliver green POI. Step 3: Ideally, that invitation kicks off a fresh three-part strategy: A. What intent is available on the ad platform? B. What new set of tactics need to be activated to match that intent with audience, creative, and offers (if relevant). C. Mr. Zuckerberg has spoken of completely automating all Advertising, just send cash & one image per product. Great. What AI-Powered features are we actively using to turbocharge tactics (B) to engage with optimal intent (A). Step 4: Simple A, B, C strategy, of course, needs lots of smart work underneath it to unlock the scale once more – this time, making tons of Profit vs. currently actively eliminating Profit. Step 5: Keep spending on Google, Meta, Tiktok, Snap, WeChat, until you see high green POI. [How high is high? That’s the job of your CFO to identify. Oh, and also what’s too low – something clearly missed in the case study above.] Cost Per Session | Bye, Bye. At this point, you recognize the utter futility of letting any Marketing team use Cost Per Sale as a Success KPI or a Metric or, dare I say, even an Influencing Variable. Right? [Note: Premium members please see: TMAI #448: KPIs, Metrics, Influencing Variables.] The Cost Per Session of Google Advantage+ was $14. Stopping your success measurement at the Cost Per Sale KPI might be delivering job promotions to Marketers, ever higher fees/rewards to your Agency, with the Ad Platform laughing all the way to the bank. You saw the POI of a $14 Cost Per Sale above. If company culture, leadership issues, or a mass hypnosis prevents you from stopping this unprofitable behavior, my advice is to suck less. Instead of using Cost Per Session, shift to measuring Cost Per Non-Bounced Session. You received 510 Sessions from Google Advantage+. A spend of $7,200 translates Cost Per Session: $14. The Bounce Rate was 52%. 245 Sessions were: I came, I puked, I left (my definition of Bounce Rate). Completely unproductive (especially since you Paid for each of these people to come!). Take them out. Cost Per Non-Bounced Session: $27. With these new, more reality reflecting numbers, there is a higher potential that your internal team and your external Agency (if they are aligned with your interests) will look at $27 and say wait, that sounds crazy high for just a Session, maybe we should dig in further and revisit our tactics. Perfect. Sucking less. There is one more reason you should dramatically deprioritize Cost Per Session focus: SEO implications in an AI Search world. Google recently shared this collection of guidance for how to do SEO for AI Search. Specifically for AI Mode – a ChatGPT or Perplexity type experience from Google. You should read and start to activate Google’s guidance immediately. [Note: Premium Subscribers, it is crucial to understand the underlying changes to Search – for both Paid and Organic. Please review: TMAI #412, #413: AI Search: The Sky Is Falling!?] Google’s guidance for better AI SEO has this important, relevant bit: Understand the full value of your visits We’ve seen that when people click to a website from search results pages with AI Overviews, these clicks are higher quality, where users are more likely to spend more time on the site. Why is this? Our AI results may give people more context about a topic overall, and display more relevant supporting links, than with classic Search. This may provide a more engaged audience and new opportunities with visitors, but you might not optimize for these if you focus too much on clicks instead of the overall value of your visits from Search. Consider looking at various indicators of conversion on your site, be it sales, signups, a more engaged audience, or information lookups about your business. Google’s saying: Don’t use Cost Per Session. Don’t incentivize Cost Per Session. Don’t focus on one-night stands. If I did not persuade you to disincentivize Cost Per Session, I hope Google did. Bottom line. If you want to support your CMO’s career – because that is also very good for you -, prioritize a focus on Outcomes over Activity. If you want to really do that, you need to ensure Marketing’s impact is resilient and incremental, prioritize a focus on Accountability over Outcomes over Activity. It is not lost on me that this is difficult, it demands a ton of smart thinking, a lot of hard work, some uncomfortable conversations. In exchange… You get an AI-disruption-proof career. Carpe diem.
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Sports Marketing Measurement Playbook.
Last year, nearly all of the top 50 telecasts in the US were connected to sports. The 97th Oscars, SNL […]
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Bye, Bye Human-Powered Marketing Analytics.
my advice to deliver IAbI, and not data. Here’s the traditional analytics workflow being practiced in your company: 1. Report […]
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Measure Marketing’s ROI Right: Incremental Net Profit ROI!
There’s a scary Giant hiding in your closet. It imposes hidden costs that, when accounted for, transform your claim that advertising is adding business profits. Short-term, long-term. The scary Giant changes your OMG! to omg? There’s an incredible return from investing time and love in identifying your Giant costs. Ex: Identifying non-working media costs, by calculating them for the core and sub-components. There is only one other thing more important in Advertising (incrementality). [Note:Newsletter Premium Subscribers: If you can’t locate TMAI #437: Compute Non-Working Media Costs and TMAI #411: Proving Marketing’s Incrementality, just hit reply.] This got me thinking about how frequently we throw around the key performance indicator (KPI), Return on Investment (ROI) – without being careful how they are computed or transparent about what they include or exclude. We simply claim: Our Performance Agency is delivering an ROI of 4! The claim’s implication: For every $1 our Agency spends on Ads, they are delivering $4 back. HURRAY!! So today… Let’s interrogate that 4. What is it? Can it be trusted to reward your Agency? A question to answer by the end: Does your Agency impact survive calculating ROI 4? This blog post was originally published as Premium edition #438 of my newsletter. Weekly, I share actionable insights and hidden patterns to stay at the bleeding edge of Marketing, Analytics, and AI. Sign up for TMAI Premium. 100% revenues are donated to charity. With the Real ROI, Please Stand Up? So, what’s ROI? The most common computation: ROI = [(Revenue – Media Costs)/(Media Costs)] Media Costs are typically the Dollars/Renminbi you paid to run ads – on Facebook, Magazines, CTV, Radio, Bing. Sometimes referred to as Advertising Costs. Revenue is the traceable sum of $$$ earned from running the aforementioned ads. ROI is often expressed at a campaign level – though you can obviously decompose it by an individual ad, a channel, a group of tactics, and on and on. [Premum Subscribers: This is when the Multi-touch Attribution methodology becomes super important – plese refer to TMAI #434.] I was reviewing a Client’s QBR for a recent Campaign and sure enough they’d computed ROI: [Privacy Note: Numbers are real, the visualization is mine. Any mistakes you catch are mine.] ROI = 4!! [Note: I’m not going to cover the commonly bandied about ROAS – Return on Ad Spend. While a close cousin of ROI, I consider ROAS to be emotionally sketchy.] The Agency did not know the Campaign’s overall budget, not unusual, as Agencies rarely do (though you should share with them). I’ve added that number to the table above. An ROI of 4 looks incredible, no? I offer that the 4 is unreal. It meets the classic definition of fake news. To sell the shoes / car parts / laptops / eyeglasses / Bluetooth adapters, you had to design them, manufacture them, ship them, store them, and wait for the order to come. Of all those costs, at the very minimum, you cannot ignore the cost to manufacture them. You sell a pair of eyeglasses for $50, you need to account for the $35 Cost to manufacture them. $35 is known as Cost of Goods Sold (COGS). Hence, this is a more real news formula of ROI: ROI 2 = [(Revenue – COGS – Media Costs)/(Media Costs)]OR ROI 2 = [(Gross Profit – Media Costs)/(Media Costs)] I call ROI 2: “Gross Profit ROI.” For the client above, this is a more real ROI the Agency delivered: For this company, the COGS was 70% of the sale price (expressed as Gross Margin above). After counting that, the amount the company made was $0.9 million, and not $3.2 million. The new, more real, ROI driven by advertising is 0.5. While heartbreaking, please learn to embrace the 0.5 – or you will never know how to be better. Wait, wait, there’s more. Remember, the total budget spent by the Marketing team was $1 million. It is not the $0.6 million being used in both the formulas above. The delta, $0.4 million, were non-working media costs. [Premium Subscribers: See TMAI Premium #437 for how.] IMPORTANT: Your Agency spent $0.6 mil, their calculation is right for what they know. You spent $1 mil, it is your job to account for this money. You must account for the Total Campaign Spend, by using this formula to compute ROI: ROI 3 = [(Revenue – Non-working Costs – COGS – Campaign Budget)/(Campaign Budget)]OR ROI 3 = [(Net Profit – Media Costs)/(Campaign Budget)] This helps us land even closer to the real ROI that your team (not Agency) delivered to the company: The Net Profit ROI 3? Minus 0.1. Your advertising campaign lost money. A shocking realization when you reported ROI as 4 to your CMO. No? We are not done getting to the business value of this campaign. There’s one more thing to get to the realest ROI from advertising. What would have happened if you did not execute this campaign?Would you have lost the entire $3.2 million in Revenue, if you had not spent the $1 million on advertising? Incrementality. Incrementality! We who are active practitioners of the art and science of incrementality know that you would have made a bunch of the $3.2 million even if you did not execute the campaign. I know, I know, it hurts our feelings as Marketers, but sadly, it is reality. Nearly all the sales that come into your company have nothing to do with Marketing! Let’s do one more computation of ROI, this time accounting for incrementality. In this case, the Agency did not practice incrementality for this Client, hence, for today, I’m going to assume it is a super high 30%. What does that number mean? 70% of the Claimed Sales by this campaign, would have occurred any way (store location, product features, seasonality, innovation, reviews on Amazon, whatever else). Here’s the final, closest to real, formula for ROI: ROI 4 = [(iRevenue – iNon-working Costs – iCOGS – Campaign Budget)/(Campaign Budget)]OR ROI 4 = [(Incremental Net Profit – Media Costs)/(Campaign Budget)] That yields the following Incremental Net Profit ROI (4) results: We really lost money. The Campaign’s incremental Net Profit ROI (iROI) is -0.7. A very different picture than the 4 the Agency presented at the start with ROI 1. Difficult Questions: What do you and your Agency compute today? ROI 3 at least? Perhaps, ROI 4?Does our journey today explain why the Marketing budget keeps getting cut by the CFO, despite Marketing’s protests that they are delivering 4x return on investment? Special Note | Brand Marketing ROI. The ROI computations above span a four to six month impact horizon. For brand marketing campaigns, the impact horizon, will stretch beyond six months. For such campaigns, we compute short-term ROI #4 using different KPIs (# People Lifted, Cost Per Individual Lifted – both vs. baselines), and different methodologies (true test-control surveys, not pre-post). And, we will hold Brand Marketing to account for delivering long-term profitability! For that, we will measure long-term ROI #4 with the same KPIs (incremental Profit), but different methodologies (longer impact horizon like advanced attribution modeling, ML-based mix models, and CausalAI). Radically improving Marketing’s ROI. Good Marketing can absolutely deliver a magnificent Return on Investment. But how? For my clients, I take a repeatedly tested in the real world four-step approach to deliver radically better ROI. I did a deep dive into each step, and actions you should take, in Premium edition #440. Here’s the summary: Step 1. The Marketing Team: Obsess about excessive non-working media costs. Step 2: The Agency: Obsess about highly incremental tactics. Step 3: The Commerce Team: Why is the Conversion Rate so low? Step 4: The Engineering Team: Product costs and process innovation The glorious profit-generating outcome my approach above looks like… You can replicate it in your company… [Higher resolution: Right Click, Open in a New Tab.] TMAI Premium subscriber? Please email me for the excel spreadsheet, and the deep dive details of the four step process above. Bottom line. Marketing tends to be the first budget to be cut in tough times. Two reasons: 1. No one at the top of the company quite believes any claim the CMO offers re impact of Marketing (see above). 2. Marketing competes with Engineering, Retail Stores, Customer Service, HR, Factories, Finance for budget – the short-term ROI from all of them is easier to see (and believe). This is our (Marketing’s) problem to understand, and fix. Here are your standards: ROI #3 is the minimum standard that’ll survive Board or CFO scrutiny. ROI #4 will ensure Marketing is among the last budgets to be cut. Carpe diem!
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The Best Marketing ROI Formula: Incremental Net Profit ROI!
There\’s a scary Giant hiding in your closet. It imposes hidden costs that, when accounted for, transform your claim that […]
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2 Seconds to Brand Impact: A Modern Video Ads Playbook
Would you believe it: Almost no one watches your video ads! Take your company employee hat off: Do you watch any other company’s video ads, if you have the choice to skip or swipe? Do you watch your company’s ads, if you have the choice to skip or swipe? The answer for you, me, our employee peers is likely no. Reason: Just as for our users… The ad’s in the way. When producing advertising, here’s the reality CMOs ignore: You are not competing against other ads. You are competing against the entire internet. All of it. If a human is actively watching your 60s ad on TV all the way to the end, the most likely reason is her phone’s battery is dead. Pause for reflection. This blog post was originally published as edition #489 of my newsletter TMAI Premium. Each week, I share strategic insights and actionable guidance on how to stay at the very bleeding edge of Marketing, Analytics, and AI-transformation. Sign up for TMAI Premium to accelerate your career trajectory. 100% of TMAI revenues are donated to charity. I am not advocating against video advertising. It is essential for effective and scalable brand marketing. I am advocating for ad creatives to embrace the decade-old reality of consumer behavior, media consumption, and attention fragmentation. I am for video advertising strategies that are built to recognize that attention is the most expensive currency on earth. To make the case for just how important this is… Here’s my synthesis of the data illustrating the average seconds of attention paid in each media channel, how much of that attention is with sound on (more effective!), and how much of your ad is watched all the way to the end… Video Ads: Attention Metrics [For a higher resolution image: Right mouse click > Open image in new tab.] Sobering, no? Big Insight: Active attention to an ad is contextual. And, brief. Increasingly: Just the first two seconds. Big Implication: A 60s TV ad is now, functionally, a 15-second ad with 45 seconds of background noise for most viewers. A 15s TikTok video ad is now, functionally, a 1s display ad view. Big Disappointment: Your Brand Marketing is largely delivering zero brand lift when measured with true test-control brand lift studies. If you are producing ads (“stories”) longer than 30 seconds – like the one- to five-minute sappy holiday creatives common this time of year – you are doing that purely for your own entertainment. Protect your career by not promising any business profits. The data above also explains why your TikTok / Reels / YT Shorts ad campaigns have almost never delivered brand lift with an above zero confidence interval – a massive waste of precious creative & Marketing budgets. [Note: TMAI Premium subscribers, carefully review TMAI #447: Confidence Intervals: A Brand Analytics MUST Have. Please email me if you do not have my awesome Excel model to compute your campaign’s real impact.] Why obsess about this? Effective Brand Marketing is the only way to grow Market Share over time. Video ads are a necessary tactic in that holy quest. Let’s embrace real consumer behavior, media consumption, and attention fragmentation. Shorter video ads. And, regardless of the ad length, front-loaded video ads with high-impact first two seconds. Wait, Wait, Wait… Loooong Ads Are Better! Like me, I’m confident you’ve heard a variation of this from your VP of Creative / Global Creative Director / CMO: Long creatives tell a better story, and people remember better stories. What does the data say? Data Fact One: Studies by Facebook’s Brand Lift team, Google/YT ABCDs find that shorter ads (6-15s) often drive equal or higher lifts in Ad Recall and Consideration than longer ads. (In part because they are less likely to be skipped or are unskippable.) Data Fact Two: Quantifying that… Research (Lumen/Teads) identifies that 15s ads drive 75-85% of the recall of a 30s ad – at half the media cost (Magna/IPG). Data Fact Three: If they hold attention throughout, longer ads (30s+) can drive higher emotional intensity and long-term brand affinity. Your VP, Director, CMO is right… Longer ads have additional value to offer! To deliver that special magic, long ad creatives have to solve three problems: 1. The long ad needs to be built to solve a different, long-term purpose. 2. If you just want to drive Unaided Brand Awareness, Consideration, or Purchase Intent, you can do so more efficiently with a shorter ad, while lowering resentment risk. The long ad creative needs to be super magnificently effective in the first 1-4 seconds. The creative has to be able to avoid the Skip / Swipe in skippable ad formats, and avoid the human looking away / going to the bathroom / looking down at their phone in the case of non-skippable formats. 3. The long ad creative needs to be supported by 3x – 6x additional media budget – when compared to the 15s ad media budget – to deliver the promised higher emotional intensity. Life Changing Insight: The modern battle for brand lift isn’t won by one long story; it is won by frequency of short, high-impact moments. No matter your ad length, if your ad is not seen x number of times over y weeks, it will not deliver impact. [Note: Premium subscribers deep dive and incorporate: TMAI #431: Impact of Ad Length on Campaign Cost.] It is difficult to meet these three magic-producing criteria, but it can be done. Use the ad length that is optimal for the business purpose you are solving for. Don’t use a jumbo jet to commute to Manhattan. Don’t try to cycle from NY to Chicago. Regardless of ad length/purpose, I’m confident you noticed that you really need to make the first two, three, seconds count. [Special Advice: The Ad Sales team at one particular ad platform aggressively champions the cause of looooooooooong ads. If you run into them, set all else aside and ask one question: How do we get distribution for the looooooooooong ads? If you get an affordable, scalable answer that spike and sustains, follow their advice.] An Ideal Video Ads Media Plan. Recognizing that effective Brand Marketing via video ads is not a one-size-fits-all, I want to sketch this starting point for your video ads strategy: Spark: 6s “Bumpers” / equivalent, will take a majority of your media budget (55-65%). They build frequency, recognition, and sustain your brand lift gains. Fuel: 15s / equivalent, will take nearly all of the rest of your media budget (25-35%). Ideally, sequenced with effective 6s ads so they would have gained interest to hear the rest of the story. Blaze: An occasional 30s (ideally non-skip) taking the remaining budget (5-8%), in big spike moments to support a specific brand feeling. Beacon: A rare, beautiful 60s film, not as an ad (0%), but organically seeded on social channels, shown in internal company meetings, submitted for industry awards. There can be small, occasional, variations. From my experience across industries and countries… For retail type companies, Spark takes up 70%. For B2B, Fuel can be up to 40%. For a revolutionary new product/company, Blaze temporarily can be 20%. Repetition: You will notice I’m consistently prioritizing frequency over length. Effective Brand Marketing is frequency-powered in an age where attention is the most expensive currency. Second repetition: Regardless of length, each type of video ad will have to start front-loaded, with a BANG. The first few seconds are critical to plant a memory, to generate interest in seeing rest of the story. Let’s learn how to do that. How to Be Creative: Zero 2 Interest in Two Seconds! Across all social video, users pay only 12 seconds of active ad attention for every hour(!!). Implication: Your share of voice is infinitesimal unless you disrupt their pattern. To do that, you have one to three seconds max. I’ll share data-identified effective creative tactics, for each channel. But first, there are five creative tactics that apply regardless of channel. Big 5 Universal Creative Effectiveness Truths. 1. Brand in 3. The brand must be recognizable within 3 seconds (logo, color, sonic signature, character). 2. Frame-One Impact. The first visual frame must tell a story or pose a question. (It is insanely difficult, that is what it takes to win.) 3. Sound as Lead, Not Support. Music, voice tone, and audio pacing drive emotional response faster than visual. 4. The “Why Now?” Answer the viewer’s unconscious question: “Why should I care about this right now?” (Reminder: Your ad’s competing against all the content on the internet.) 5. Creative Pre-Tested. The only way to win before you spend is to pre-test your creative – and ensure it passed in your ad’s media channel and your intended audience. For Concepts and high media weight Executions, use HMM Pro. For high volume, low media weight Executions, TikTok/Shorts/Reels, use HMM AI. These are super high standards for your creative teams to meet. In a world where you’ll get 12 seconds of ad attention per hour… Recommendations 1 – 5 above are mandatory. If you feel your video ads are falling short of the above truths: A. That explains why you can’t prove an iota of incremental impact from Brand Marketing on long-term Revenue. B. That should be a reason you pause your current video ad spend until your creative team/agency can deliver worthy creative. The Build Effective Creative Journey Continues. Every channel has its nuances. What works on TV rarely works on YouTube. What works on Reels often does not work for Facebook. Mobile video ads needs different Big Bang Two-Second start than if they are served on CTV. In TMAI #490 I’ve shared detailed best practices I’ve validated through testing and media tactics individually for Linear TV, CTV, YouTube Skippable, Facebook/Instagram Feed, TikTok/Reels/Shorts, and Snapchat. Lessons from approx. $10 bil in brand marketing spend analyzed. If you are a new TMAI Premium member, please email me if you can’t find edition 490 with detailed Part 2. If you are not, grab an annual Premium subscription here – the insights will transform your professional effectiveness! Bottom line. Our belief in the power of story is correct. Our canvas has changed. The 60-second spot is not dead, as illustrated above, it has a purpose in a Beacon strategy on free channels and for earning awards. The 60-second ad as interruption is dead. It does not perform as a media strategy. (Neither is there much inventory to buy. The platforms know it does not work!) Short-form creative is how we earn attention, and earn permission to tell our (slightly) longer, richer story. We are not abandoning our craft. Our quest remains legendary brand lift! The path we take to get there is new. Carpe diem. Avinash. PS: In the world of Chinese livestream sales, Zheng Xiang Xiang’s approach is super impressive. She sells 100 million Yuan ($19m) of products in a week. Don’t emulate it. Xiang Xiang operates within available attention. Appreciate that to become a better Marketer.
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2 Seconds to Brand Impact: A Modern Video Ads Playbook
Would you believe it: Almost no one watches your video ads! Take your company employee hat off: Do you watch […]
The post 2 Seconds to Brand Impact: A Modern Video Ads Playbook appeared first on Occam’s Razor by Avinash Kaushik.
Marketing Analytics: Methodologies Trump Metrics!
If a conversation is occurring about Data and Analytics, chances are high that it is about Metrics. About how abhorrent Vanity Metrics are. About the marginal value of Activity Metrics. About how crucial a focus on Outcome Metrics is. About Metrics for Dashboard – NO! Only KPIs for Dashboards. About the difference between KPIs and […]
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Marketing Analytics Mistake #1: Efficiency Without Effectiveness!
“Let’s all focus on a single metric, a True North for the entire company!” This is an understandable sentiment from Extremely Senior Leaders (ESLs). There are so many data pukes (sorry, “dashboards”) running around the organization, employees face such difficulty in being able to be smarter. Or, worse, Teams/Agencies can cherry-pick and show “impact.” Hence, […]
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Scapegoating Analysts | Recognizing & Preventing A Bad Idea.
Here’s a sign that you’ve arrived as an Analyst or an Analytics team: At the first sign of failure reported by the data, most people blame you (Analyst/Data). Wear it as a badge of honor! It means your analysis has identified insights that are big enough, important enough, that the recipients get instantly worried. Ideally, […]
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Strategic Marketing Analytics: CMO Dashboards That Rock!
An extraordinary amount of time, effort, $$$ are spent on building dashboards/scorecards for CMOs… Yet, the end result, nearly always, is a useless data puke. It turns out boiling the ocean is hard. To build an effective big picture scorecard for the CMO, that is not data pukey, there are three crucial challenges that have […]
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Transform Data’s Impact: Pick The Right Success KPI!
Your analysis provides clear data that the campaign was a (glorious) failure. It could not be clearer. The KPI you chose for your brand campaign was Trust, it had a pre-set target of +5. The post-campaign analysis that compares performance across Test & Control cells shows that Trust did not move at all. (Suspiciously, there […]
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Winning With Data: Say No To Insights, Yes To Out-of-sights!
If there is one thing the universe agrees on, it is that you should just provide data… You should provide INSIGHTS!!! In the 807,150 (!) words I’ve written on this blog thus far, at least 400,000 have been dedicated to helping you find insights. In posts about advanced segmentation, in posts about how to build […]
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The Most Important Business KPIs. (Spoiler: Not Conversion Rate!)
I was reading a paper by a respected industry body that started by flagging head fake KPIs. I love that moniker, head fake. Likes. Sentiment/Comments. Shares. Yada, yada, yada. This is great. We can all use head fake metrics to calling out useless activity metrics. [I would add other head fake KPIs to the list: […]
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Increase Analytics Influence: Leverage Predictive Metrics!
Almost all metrics you currently use have one common thread: They are almost all backward-looking. If you want to deepen the influence of data in your organization – and your personal influence – 30% of your analytics efforts should be centered around the use of forward-looking metrics. Predictive metrics! But first, let’s take a small […]
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Cookies To Humans: Implications Of Identity Systems On Incentives!
A story where data is the hero, followed by two mind-challenging business-shifting ideas. At a previous employer customer service on the phone was a huge part of the operation. Qualitative surveys were giving the company a read that customers were unhappy with the service being provided. As bad customer service is a massive long-term cost […]
Cookies To Humans: Implications Of Identity Systems On Incentives! is a post from: Occam’s Razor by Avinash Kaushik
It’s Not The Ink, It’s The Think: 6 Effective Data Visualization Strategies
Ten years, and the 944,357 words, are proof that I love purposeful data, collecting it, pouring smart strategies into analyzing it, and using the insights identified to transform organizations. In the quest for that last important bit, I am insanely obsessive about 1. simplification and 2. pressing the right emotional buttons. The reasons are that […]
It’s Not The Ink, It’s The Think: 6 Effective Data Visualization Strategies is a post from: Occam’s Razor by Avinash Kaushik
Rock Analytics More: Obsess About Goals And Goal Values!
If you don’t have goals, you are not doing digital analytics. You are doing i am wasting earth’s precious oxygenalytics. Let’s back up. Let me start with a story. We were brain storming about the next clustseeer of coolness for Analytics, the conversation quickly went to what Analysts need to look at on a daily, […]
Rock Analytics More: Obsess About Goals And Goal Values! is a post from: Occam’s Razor by Avinash Kaushik
Excellent Analytics Tip #27: Chase Smart Calculated Metrics!
For the last decade (#omg!), I’ve consistently complained about a fundamental flaw in Web Analytics tools: They incentivize one night stands, rather than engagements matching customer-intent. This leads to owners of digital experiences (insanely) expecting all visitors to their websites to convert right away – anything less than that is a failure. Damn the intent […]
Excellent Analytics Tip #27: Chase Smart Calculated Metrics! is a post from: Occam’s Razor by Avinash Kaushik
Great Storytelling With Data: Visualize Simply And Focus Obsessively
The difference between a Reporting Squirrel and Analysis Ninja? Insights. As in, the former is in the business of providing data, the latter in the business of understanding the performance implied by the data. That understanding leads to insights about why the performance occurred, which leads to so what we should do. [Sidebar] I’m experimenting […]
Great Storytelling With Data: Visualize Simply And Focus Obsessively is a post from: Occam’s Razor by Avinash Kaushik