C3 Metrics CEO Hughes Deconstructs Fornaise Study & Provides Solution to get CMOs Focused on Metrics
CEOs don’t trust marketing. This comes from the newly-published London Fournaise Study where 1,200 CEOs from North America, Europe, Asia, and Australia were interviewed.
Disconnected From Reality
80% of them said they don’t trust the work done by marketers. 80% of CEOs also said marketers are “too disconnected” from the financial realities of companies.
The Fournaise study indicated that CEOs think: marketers live too much in their creative and social media bubble and focus too much on parameters such as “likes,” “tweets,” “feeds,” or “followers.”
The sound of the wake-up call is deafening.
For Martin Sorrell, John Wren, Michael Roth, Maurice Levy, and the shareholders of agency holding companies—this translates into havoc. Because when a new CMO comes in, a huge amount of resources are devoted to relationship building and understanding a clients’ business. But two years later the account is yanked out from under the rug, wreaking financial havoc.
The heart of this agency malaise is discovered in the single sentence of the Fournaise survey: marketers are too disconnected from the financial realities of the company.
An Explosive Solution
The solution is--explosives. Blow up the model, blow up the trend, blow up... Read more
Tagged 'metrics' 
Did Mad Men Measure ROI? What Don Draper’s Been Missing for Brand Marketers
When the Don Drapers of the world launched a client campaign, there was only one performance indicator – sales figures. If sales went up, the campaign was a success. So now that we are able to measure each aspect of a campaign, why do some folks still look at the components in a silo?
Back in the good old days of advertising, when the Don Drapers of the world launched a campaign for a client, there was only one performance indicator – sales figures. If sales went up, the campaign was considered a success, even though no one really had any idea what truly caused the lift. Then, along came online advertising, which brought with it a whole new, more granular way of looking at campaign performance.
When you run an online campaign you have the ability to track your campaign from day one, in almost real-time. This accessibility and abundance of data is both a blessing and a curse. While it gives us the power to finely tune campaigns to maximize ROI and minimize spend, the online portion of the buy becomes highly scrutinized, while the inherent value of “traditional” tactics such as billboards often go unquestioned.
The danger of simply looking... Read more
Marketers: Make sure your numbers tell a story!
It is easy to drown in number soup. The key is to focus on the story numbers tell not the numbers themselves.
"Numbers are the universal language of business. We use them to attract investors for our startup ideas, to win approval for product introductions, to make the case for expanding into new markets or entering new categories. In other words, numbers, when used well, tell a compelling story. So why is it that so many of the numbers we encounter in business — from endless Excel spreadsheets to bloodless calculations in business plans — make our eyes glaze over rather than set our minds racing?"
Continue reading What Surprising Number Will Change Your Business? on the Harvard Business Review Blog. By Fast Company co-founder Bill Taylor.
