Tag: marketing transparency

CMA reveals digital advertising market problems in the UK

The digital marketing spend is growing putting marketers under pressure to justify huge investments. And even with a variety of measurement techniques it’s not easy to find what really works, especially taking into account transparency issues. In this article we discuss new problems related to digital media and how to cope with them. An independent government department in the UK that promotes competition and consumer law – Competition and Markets Authority’s (CMA) – carried out an investigation of digital advertising sphere as a part of the new strategy designed to better handle quickly growing digital economy. In July 2019, they started looking into operations of online platforms, including the two biggest ones – Google and Facebook. The report voices concerns about transparency of the business, but before we go deeper in detail, let’s take a look back and see how we got to the current situation. It all started with the 2016 ANA/K2 Intelligence report on media transparency in the U.S., which was a true wake-up call for the advertising industry. The report revealed numerous non-transparent business practices like rebates in different agencies. The fact that they failed to act in the best interests of their clients severely shook the… Read more »

How to deal with in-housing problems

According to a joint research by In-House Agency Forum and Forrester, 64% of American corporations had an in-house agency in 2018 compared to 42% in 2008. The trend is becoming a reality even though it’s costly and challenging. In this article we investigate the benefits of building internal capabilities, functions better managed internally and ways to deal with widespread concerns and obstacles. It is quite obvious that large brands like Procter & Gamble, Ally Financial and Clorox wouldn’t set up internal marketing teams if it was useless. For example, P&G established its own agency in 2018 as a part of their new marketing strategy saving $750 mln. Apart from cost efficiency in-housing is also driven by the opportunity to gain greater brand insights, increase transparency and control over the creative. Another advantage of IHAs is they have the same goal with the brand and are more invested in successful outcome, which is not always the case with outside agencies. Sometimes they have conflicting interests and focus not on promoting the advertiser but on promoting themselves. It’s definitely not always the case, but happens occasionally. In-house teams better understand the business, know more about your products or services. They are insiders… Read more »

Marketing spend: to cut or optimize?

Over the last decade marketing effectiveness has been slowly declining and the industry has gone through a lot of changes. In attempt to save budgets many companies decided to reduce this expenditure area, but how wise was this move, given that marketing drives growth and enterprise value? This article covers an approach everyone should take when it comes to allocating budget. Marketers all over the world are under pressure to justify their huge spend, which amounts to 10% of revenue on average. In 2017 Binet & Field published a book called Marketing Effectiveness in the Digital Era, where they wrote that marketing effectiveness is currently declining. There are a few possible reasons behind such a trend: media fragmentation / complexity; too many metrics: address this issue by identifying key metrics for your organization; marketing effectiveness culture is still developing; lack of collaboration within a company: marketing and finance alone have four obstacles complicating their cooperation; narrow focus on some attribution models; focus on short-term results: the pie chart below demonstrates when campaign performance is measured. More than half of all respondents focused on immediate outputs, while only a third took into account longer time periods. But ads’ potential to drive… Read more »

12 competencies marketers develop to achieve best-in-class marketing accountability

Today, around 10% of revenue is allocated to marketing, and in 2018 these spends amounted approximately to a trillion dollars worldwide. All marketers are under pressure to justify such huge investments, but top professionals know how to cope with it. In this article you will find out how to become a high-performing marketer as well as increase accountability and transparency in your company. Despite all technological advancements in the industry, accurate quantification of marketing contribution remains a serious challenge, mainly because there are no universal standards in this area. Forbes addressed the problem by establishing an initiative together with the Marketing Accountability Standards Board aimed at helping businesses better measure, optimize and understand the contribution of marketing. They also conducted a research involving 800 CMOs to select the most effective tools, strategies and approaches available now. Every detail matters, all promotion channels, traditional and digital must be used in the most effective and efficient way, every investment should be a well-informed decision. Today data is power, so it doesn’t come as a surprise when experts mention it among analytics and martech that improve marketing performance. Here are nine key takeouts from the research, by doing which a company can get… Read more »