A New Era of Advertising – From Mad Men to Math Men and Back

Reconciling Brand & Direct Response

Brand advocates promote the necessity of defining a clear & evocative image, easily allowing

consumers to identify and buy into the brand and corresponding products. This is achieved using

“top of the funnel marketing” – packaging (a website/ clear identity), findability (Google &

mainstream newspapers, magazines, and blogs), and importantly premium advertising such as sponsoring sports events, rich media banners, billboards, radio, and TV.

Direct response advocates quantitative methodologies, as attributing ad-spend with KPIs such as new

customers, their corresponding value, and the viral effect. The primary ethos is that advertising

monies should be spent according to what achieves the best response per $1 – so the more high quality/ targeted customers that can be acquired, the greater the overall revenue increase will be.

Attributing

The inherent difficult of working out whether one approach is better than another, the ideal mix, or

efficacy is the quintessential problem of attribution. In the case of brand spend, it is possible to

measure to a certain extent customer perception (before & after) – whether using social media buzz,

surveys, or up-lift in sales. However, even the most ardent measurement companies will accept measuring sentiment is as much an art as a science.

Whilst it is easier to attribute and thus measure direct response spend it is still far from perfect. For

example a $100,000 campaign driving 100,000 clicks, 50,000 downloads, and 10,000 sales look

simple enough. How many of those 10,000 sales would have happened anyway? Additionally, how

many sales have occurred that where not tracked because the sale occurred outside of the time -

tracking window or due to a technical error?

How to know what to do?

It appears based on the conflicting evidence that it is impossible to know which part of your spend is

the most effective ie the old adage “50% of your advertising budget is wasted”. MobAd recommends

running a series of tests to try and ascertain with as much accuracy which steps to take and how to allocate budgets.

For example, consumer goods products – such as P&G & Unilever by their very nature are more

suited to high profile brand & experiential spend.

Practical/utility products such as computer games are more accustomed to direct response spend.

Taking a Practical Approach

It is possible to reconcile Math Men & Mad Men. So taking mobile media for example, the one

constant is that if brands wish to advertise they have to run banners – the question of where & at

what price and with whom is ultimately up to the decision of the marketer and the nature of the

product & their individual leanings.

However, it can clearly be accepted that if banners are going to be utilised, one should look to make

the banners as effective as possible- whether one is adopting a direct response or brand methodology.

An interesting experiment that was run recently on Facebook showed utilising blank banners (as

opposed to regular banners with text & colours) were actually clicked 1.5X more than regular ads.

While this is not necessarily the best approach for high-profile brands, it does show that the “brand

effect”, non-scientific creativity, clearly creates a huge different in the results – which can thus be measured using direct response methodology (quantitative techniques).

MobAd therefore advocates that for best performance agencies & brands should utilise both their

mathematicians to measure the tests and their creatives to come up with cool & quirky ideas to gain attention & direct the most suitable people to engage with the ads.