The Marketing Bureau

By Brian H Meredith
From the NZBusiness Magazine"Marketing Maestro" Archive.
First published November 2003

“...the luxury of those sitting on the sidelines.” This is what John Nash’s (imaginary) boss says of “conviction” in the movie “A Beautiful Mind.” For those of us who choose to play rather than watch in the game of marketing, measurement, not conviction, belief or gut feel is the compass that must guide us.

I grew up in a marketing world cram packed full of “conviction” – conviction that “my gut never lets me down”, that “if we pour enough money into it it’ll deliver”, that “share of voice equals share of sales” and a zillion other firmly held convictions.

The early part of my career was in U.K. ad agencies during the golden years of the late ‘70s and early ‘80s. Agencies were fat . Client’s apparently limitless advertising budgets were the cholesterol that clogged the arteries of accountability in even the healthiest of agencies.

Millions of pounds (neah, tens of millions of pounds) were routinely spent by agencies on behalf of their clients on little more than a wing, a prayer and a bottle (case) of Puligny Montrachet.

I have sat in creative briefings where the written brief has been discarded, unread, by the “superstar” creative team and replaced by the question they asked of themselves:

“Hmmmm, now where can we go to shoot this?”.

“Shoot what?” asked the hapless suit.

“The f…ing” commercial”.

“What commercial?” bravely persisted the suit “How can you know there’s even gonna be a commercial until you’ve read the brief?”

“Listen, toe rag” shot back the writer, “we’ll decide what we will and won’t do and we’ll write the brief afterwards to fit”

Stretching the truth? Not a bit of it. That conversation happened and I know ‘cos I was the hapless suit.

Clients wore their agencies in the same way they would have worn their Armani suits if only they could have afforded them.

Clients were, in reality, the Cinderellas of the Agency : Client relationship. Marketing Managers were paid peanuts compared to the suits in their agency who would arrive in their brand new European cars and park them right alongside the slightly faded, 5 year old Volvo wagon of the Marketing Manager.

But that was OK because there was enough fat in the agency to allow them to plough back (re-invest) some of the client’s money into making the client feel like the star of the show – travel, entertainment, gifts, glamorous parties chock full of glamorous people - you know the story.

It was one very big and very long party and the neighbours (clients) couldn’t complain about the noise ‘cos they were invited.

So imagine a lowly Marketing Manager taking a senior suit to one side and saying something inflammatory like:

“Can we get together on Friday and explore how we can make our marketing metrics more robust?”

The suit would have spluttered his Armagnac all over the client and coughed on his Davidoff before putting his arm a round his shoulder and uttering a sentence that began with the words, “Now look here dear chap, let’s not be too hasty…….”

Advertising (and most other forms of marcoms) in that era was not expected to be held accountable for a return on investment largely because no-one knew how to do it anyway.

Which was great for the agency business (at least for those along for the ride at the time) but not so great for clients and, in the long term, not great for the entire marketing profession and those ancillary sectors that support it (including ad agencies). Marketers have still to live down the bullshit & bunkum label in the minds of many of their colleagues in other departments.

Zap on a couple of decades.

What is your most important marketing tool?

Your spreadsheet application should be high at the top of the list.

Running your marketing department without constant attention to the numbers is simply irresponsible.

The numbers matter. Measurement matters. The language of the beanies matters – terms like investment, ROI, contribution and many more need to become the vocabulary of the savvy and effective marketer.

Ignoring the numbers is not just irresponsible, it’s inexcusable.  

And yet I still encounter businesses every week where “conviction” remains at the heart of their management and their decision making.
Dangerous stuff. Really dangerous stuff.

As former NYC mayor Rudy Giuliani said when asked how he reduced crime in the city, in reference to the extensive use of metrics and benchmarks exercised by his administration: "If you can't measure it, you can't manage it."