The What, Why and How Well of Measuring Marketing

I’ve spent the better part of the last 6 years as the marketing boss at two different technology companies. During that time, one of the most common thoughts on my mind has been, “how can we do this better?” The term, “better” has taken on different definitions at different times in the lifecycles of these two companies. Sometimes it has meant doing things “with a higher degree of maturity,” (think: best practices). At other times, it has meant doing things “with a higher rate of return,” (think: ROI). Still other times, doing things “better” simply meant finding ways to run the business of marketing in a more “measurably sound” way (think: dashboards and scorecards ad nauseum).

Recently, I had someone tell me, “you know, Marketing has always been one of those things that’s difficult to really measure the value of.” That really surprised me, because over the past 10 years, the business of marketing has gotten orders of magnitude more data-driven. Think about it:

In the 90′s, B2B marketers had some basic customer activity and spending patterns in their databases. If they hired the right guy to setup their reports, more sophisticated organizations could correlate a little bit of what their prospects were doing across various marketing channels and campaigns, but that was rare.

Over the past decade, however, we’ve finally gotten the CRM to understand the entire relationship with the customer, because for the first time marketing, sales and customer care all work out of the same system. With one strong system of record, we’ve begun to track a lot more information about everyone we work with, which gives us a lot better understanding of our business. Meanwhile, web analytics have gotten much more actionable and specific, and for those of us who have upgraded from Google Analytics to Adobe/Omniture–integrated with the CRM–we have a much more powerful view of WHO our spending to drive traffic to the website are bringing us. Which is critical to justify programs we fund such as optimizing organic search traffic, buying ads, content marketing or the other numerous social initiativies we work on. And of course, with a marketing automation system in place tracking every interaction as someone goes from a faceless clicker to a well-known client, we often have more data than we know what to do with (a tangent better addressed in its own post). I mean, doesn’t Salesforce.com + Eloqua + Omniture = the marketing triumvirate? Yes, but it’s a quadrumvirate we need.

So what are we missing?

Here’s my thought:

We’re using the tools above to measure how well we’re spending our discretionary budget. But what about the human capital we are “spending”? How well are we investing that? Until Marketing departments can continuously demonstrate (in real time, by the way) that they are intelligent and efficient stewards of everything the company spends on marketing (including both the budget and people), they will always be perceived to be little more than artists with business degrees. There are three pertinent questions you must be able to answer to the business for as an investor of people resources: What are your people doing, Why are they doing it (…right now, next, never), and How Well are they doing it?

So how do I measure my people? Stay tuned.

Dear NBA: You Need to Win Back Your Customers

Last night, I found myself missing the NBA. Like my Thanksgiving feast, Thanksgiving weekend has always had great variety of sports to consume. For me, the glut of food isn’t really complete without a glut of sports–I need college football, pro football, college hoops and pro hoops. Unfortunately, this year, my sports feast was missing the mashed potatoes and gravy–the NBA.

As I sat pondering the NBA lockout and the impass the two sides have come to, I started to get really annoyed that the third side of this negotiation is the one that gives the other two anything to debate. You and I are the third side. That $2 billion–it’s our money. We give it to them when we buy their gear, pay the exhorbitant fees to go to their arenas (which we loaned them the money to build in the first place) and when we sit and watch the ads on TNT and ESPN play during their games. We’re part of the NBA–we’re the customer–but we’re treated like the fortunate benefactor who should be grateful to be graced with the opportunity to give them our money. So why aren’t we more angry about this? I think it’s because we love their product so much…or at least we think we love it that much. But do we really love it that much?

Let me use an analogy to try to put this ridiculous situation into perspective:

The Parabel of the Bickering Girls

One afternoon my doorbell rang and I opened the door to discover a cute little Girl Scout and her somewhat unattractive mother standing on my front porch. Like Pavlov’s dog, I immediately began to salivate as I reached for my wallet. Mmmm… Thin Mints… Samoas… Tagalongs… I love this time of year. There’s nothing quite like Girl Scout Cookies.

“Hi guys, I’ve missed you,” I start to say but I’m interrupted by the mother who says, “hold on a minute, we’ve got to work out how we’re going to split up your money.”

They proceed to argue right there on my front porch. The girl said she wanted half of the money they make, because without her cute little sales pitch, I wouldn’t even want the cookies. Plus, who doesn’t want to see cute little girls who have never had much get some money to do things they otherwise wouldn’t have been able to do. The mother said, I’m the one who enrolled you in Girl Scouts, I bought you that little uniform, and got you access to the cookies in the first place, so I deserve at least half. Back and forth they go, and for some reason I just stood there listening. Probably because I was imagining those Thin Mints coming out of the freezer… Mmmmm…

As I listened, I found myself getting sucked into the conversation–even starting to take sides. I could certainly see Mom’s point of view, after all, this girl wouldn’t be doing this without the franchise platform Mom helped her get setup in. On the other hand, I have to say, if it wasn’t for these little girls and the good cause they’re a part of, I probably wouldn’t pay such a premium for the product.

After about 20 minutes of this, seeing that they clearly didn’t mind wasting my time, I just closed the door and left. Just before bed, I noticed they were still standing there debating. “Whatever, I thought… I’ll let them go, maybe after a late night they’ll finally work this out.”

The next morning, I went out to get the paper and they had moved to the car, but they were still talking. I decided to see if I could at least get closure for myself, because I had a dinner party that evening and was hoping I could serve their cookies.

I knocked on the window and said, “Um guys, would it be okay if I just gave you my money and got a few boxes and then you can figure out how to divide it up later?”

Both of them paused, looked at me calmly and said, “You know what, we’ve been working really hard to get this settled, but we can tell you that we’re not going to have it resolved in time for your dinner party. We’re hopeful that we can get it worked out in the next few weeks. Oh and by the way, since we haven’t been able to get this resolved, we’re not going to have Thin Mints this year.”

At least for me, when I think of it this way, I really get bugged. The NBA is arguing over MY entertainment dollars–money I haven’t even given them yet. Meanwhile, life goes on, and I have been forced to buy substitutes for the NBA. I’ve watched different events, spent money doing different things, and guess what? I’m okay. Maybe I don’t need them as much as I thought.

This morning, the NBA announced they’re coming back. It was as if they were saying, “Merry Christmas – we’ve decided on a date when you can start giving us your money again.” The underlying assumption is that we’ll be overjoyed to return to giving them our money.

You know what? I think it’s time we told these annoying little “Girl Scouts” who’ve been wasting our time bickering about how they’re going to divide our money that now we’re not ready to give it to them. It’s time for a Fan Lockout.

For 16 games, they have told us they’d let us know when we could give them our money. What other product IN THE WORLD would be able to keep its customers if they said that.

It’s time for us to send them a message that their customers are part of this equation too, by taking our money somewhere else for the first 16 games after their lockout. If arenas are empty and TV sets don’t tune in, maybe they will realize that while we love their cookies, we are not beholden to them, and this level of greed is unacceptable. It’s time for the NBA to start spending a little of their energy on the linchpin in this whole equation–taking care of the fans who they need to buy their product.

Who’s with me?

PHOTO CREDITS: Lockout Graphic; Cartoon

On Premises In A Western Town with Denim Walls…

Remember that catchy Pet Shop Boys song entitled West End Girls? Great song, am I right? I recorded that song off the radio on my awesome yellow Sony sport mini ghetto blaster in 1984 and I used to listen to it all the time. I remember singing along with the Boys…

(feel free to sing along with me beginning 10 seconds in)

In a Western town with denim walls
Eastern boys and Western girls

One day (much more recently than I care to admit), I was singing along to that tune when someone noticed how far off my lyrics were. What was I thinking? A town with denim walls? Huh? In my defense, they have English accents, so “East end” sounds like “Eastuhn”, doesn’t it? I digress… Had I bothered to think about what I was saying for two seconds, I would have probably realized I had the wrong lyric.

Every now and then as a marketing professional, I find myself stopping to listen to the lyrics I’m singing or someone else is singing. Often it results in one of those head-scratching moments where I say to myself in my best Inigo Montoya accent, “…you kee sayeen that worr. I do nah think it means a whaa you think it means.” Today as I begin week three at my new job, I’ve hit my saturation level with one of those words. Now I’m not saying I’m smarter than an entire industry, but from what I can tell, a lot of folks out there are singing about denim walls…

I’ve worked in the software business for a long time, and the hot deployment model today is something called Software as a Service (typically referred to as SaaS). In a nutshell, that means instead of you installing and running the software on your equipment in your datacenter, we do it in ours and you have accounts to login and use the service on demand. I won’t go into why this is such a great model other than to say that there are a number of compelling reasons for organizations to buy software this way.

AtTask is a SaaS company that’s making its mark in the project and portfolio management space. In our industry, there are still organizations who insist on running the software in their facilities on their hardware. We call that model “on premises,” meaning the system runs on the customer’s premises. Oddly, however, just about every time I’ve seen anyone write about this model, they call it “on premise”. And people are getting it wrong at such a high rate on such high-profile websites that it’s starting to stick. It’s starting to drive me crazy.

Here’s the problem: The word premise is the singular form of the word and means an assertion, assumption or proposition. Apparently because of the way this word is used in land deeds, this has come to mean “grounds or buildings” in its plural form: premises. If there is a shred of logic behind the way I keep seeing the word premise used, I suppose someone could be thinking, “they aren’t running our software not in “buildings” (plural), they’re running it in a “building” (singular). Wikipedia effectively dismantles that rationale here:

Note that a single house or a single other piece of property is “premises”, not a “premise”, although the word “premises” is plural in form as in “The equipment is located on the customer’s premises” and never “The equipment is located on the customer’s premise”. see more: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Premises

I think what’s really happening here is writers are just lazily mimicking the way they’ve seen it misspelled or mispronounced in the past and we’re all just rolling with it. So I’m putting all of you on notice: you’re misspelling it – you’re getting it wrong. I don’t care if you’re Eastern boys or Western girls – if you keep getting it wrong, I will have not choice but to embarrass you in front of the whole class.

Marcia, Marcia MARCIA! That’s What I’m Talkin’ About.

The other day, a colleague Tweeted:

Unofficial poll to solve a family dispute: What is your most memorable quote from ‘The Brady Bunch’?

My immediate response was “Marcia, Marcia, Marcia.” Not only is that a one-liner that’s gotten huge play in pop-culture, but it’s also probably the only line from the series I can remember.

(this is from the 10th episode of Season 3 of The Brady Bunch)

It turns out the Marcia line was the run-away favorite in his informal poll (IMDB apparently agrees, since they list it first in their list too). But why out of 5 seasons is this line the most memorable?

The short answer is pop-culture fanatics (like me) love one-liners. They’re prepackaged inside jokes that you can tell to total strangers and they instantly know what you’re talking about, and this line has gone the rounds in pop-culture.

So how does a one-liner get wings? I don’t exactly know, but here are a few of my thoughts. 

First, I think there has to be some familiar emotion that the line invokes within the audience. Certainly cultural anthropologists (who I am not) would factor in the audience’s sympathy to the plight of the jealous younger sister who’s always trying to shine in the shadow of her pretty and popular older sister. A lot of people can relate to the middle-child issues that are at play, too. I think this one hits on the classic playground teasing mentality. Jan was already the pathetic, weak character, but then she sat on the couch and whined out a “tease-me-I’m-a-loser” poster. Anyone who’s ever teased anybody was all over Jan’s lament, ready to throw it back in her face. Just like professional athletes try not to say stupid things to the media for fear of creating locker room propaganda for the opposing team, Jan provided the show’s most lasting t-shirt catchphrase in her moment of competitive frustration with her older sister.

Second, if you can polarize people with the emotions you invoke (i.e., invoke more than one and ideally opposite emotions) then you have a recipe for greater success. Jan’s one-liner is delivered in a way that not only invokes feelings of compassion and sympathy, but also brings the mean first grader out in some, causing laughter, finger pointing, etc.

Finally, you need distribution. I don’t know how this stuff gets into our vocabularies, but when something transcendent like this happens in a popular TV show, people start to use it in real-life situations. The lines that work without having to be rewritten tend to take wings, (think: “no soup for you”, “whatchu talking about Willis”, “How YOU doin’”, etc.) Besides being in the TV show, this line has been parodied in a number of TV shows and films, including the Brady Bunch movie and became recurring sketch on SNL.

So what does this mean to marketers? No matter what you’re selling, if you can get into the vernacular of your audience (plant your own inside joke into their lives somewhere so that they can refer to and quote something you produced), you can drive brand impressions. The same way the Marcia line invokes Brady Bunch memories, your one-liner can and should invoke your product or brand.

 

You Too Can Feel Like MacGyver…

I’m just saying… If you happen to find a guy who will salvage an Electriscreen from Stewart Filmscreen for $100 and then you can find someone else to hang it up in the ceiling, but you can’t get the A/V company to come run power to it and install a switch because your sales rep went on vacation and the installer won’t call you back (probably because you didn’t give him that Subway gift card yet to thank him for all of the time he spent helping you a couple of weeks ago) and you have a board meeting so you need the screen to come down or the show can’t go on… All you need to know is this:

The screen has four wires: Green, Black, White and Red. If you climb up on a ladder and stick the stripped ends of the White and the Red wires into the hot and neutral slots of an extension cord, the screen will come down. Or is it Black and White? Who cares, there are only four wires and connecting one of the possible 2-wire combinations to power will result in the screen coming down*.

You’re welcome.

*Disclaimer: You’re on your own if you’re outside of the US. I have no idea how your screens and extension cords are wired.

Pb Has Nothing To Do With Leadership #rant

Okay Jeopardy wizards, here’s an answer for you in the “Junior High Chemistry” category for $300: “Located between Thallium and Bismuth on the Periodic Table, guns (not roses) can fill you full of this heavy metal.”

If you got “What is Lead?”, give yourself $300.

Why are we (and when I say we, I mean you) having so much trouble with this little word? I can’t tell you how many times I’ve read executive bios and LinkedIn summaries that talk about how so-and-so once Lead a certain business unit for a period of time, or how they once Lead a department or company to impressive financial results. No they didn’t! They LED them if it happened in the past or they LEAD them today.

C’mon marketers. No more executive bios with the past tense of lead spelled like the stuff in my pencil.

Whew. I feel better.

Making PowerPoint, Photoshop and Illustrator Work Together

There are three tools every marketer should learn and eventually become an expert with – Microsoft PowerPoint, Adobe Illustrator and Adobe Photoshop. Most people start with PowerPoint and then start to learn one of the two Adobe products (generally not both). Because the two Adobe products have such steep learning curves and historically have been so different in their behaviors and functions, it’s very common to find people who have focused on learning one or the other.

For me, it was Photoshop that first changed my world. In 1995, I started building presentations with WordPerfect and eventually Corel Presentations. I used every feature in the box to produce presentations that wow-ed people. Then one day, a new hire looked at one of my presentations and said, “you built all of that in Presentations? I didn’t know it could do half of that stuff. I can’t imagine what you could do if you learned the professional tools.” A few days later, I installed Photoshop 4.0 and began to see a whole new level of possibilities. For the next 10 years of my career, I used Photoshop extensively. Initially to embellish presentations with things I couldn’t do in PowerPoint, and then for web design and even some print design. (Years later, I would discover how painful I had made my life by not learning Illustrator and InDesign, but that’s a topic for another post.)

There were always a few things that drove me crazy about the marriage of Photoshop and PowerPoint: Whenever I put something (usually a .jpg) I built in Photoshop into a PowerPoint slide, it only looked clean if the image file was very large. But if the image I built in Photoshop was very large, the PowerPoint file became massive. I also found that in large organizations PowerPoint presentation templates change and if you use .jpg images you built in Photoshop and the background color went from dark to light or from light to dark, you had to rebuild all of your .jpgs, because they had white backgrounds, (or at least white corners and edges). I also spent way too much time making custom one-off slides for people who loved a slide, but asked, “could you change this arrow”, or “change this word”. These problems led me to use graphics built in other applications in PowerPoint less and less, preferring to build everything in PowerPoint directly so I wouldn’t need to be involved in every edit and so my slide decks wouldn’t be so massive, and I wouldn’t have those annoying white corners showing when the background turned from white to black.

I came up with some rules I tried to follow everytime I built a slide from then on:

1. The file should be as small as possible
2. All text in every slide should be editable in PowerPoint
3. Whenever possible, all elements of diagrams should be built in PowerPoint in order to allow for customization and reuse of diagram elements
4. Presentations should look crisp and beautiful (no blurry images) at any size (from laptop screen to 40′ screen in a large auditorium)
5. If any graphics are used, they should be .gif or .png files so the backgrounds are transparent (no more white corners)

For a long time, I drew all of my diagrams in PowerPoint and just used Photoshop to make .png files of the graphics I had to use. While all of this was going on, I started using Illustrator everyday. I started to become addicted to the crisp look and tiny file size of vector artwork. At about that same time, I started getting requests to generate PDF versions of my slides. That’s when I realized Photoshop and PowerPoint can no longer be separated, they must get a divorce. Rule #6 broke up the marriage.

6.   All PowerPoint presentations should export cleanly to PDF

I sort of subliminally understood that Photoshop was for raster art and Illustrator was vector, but I had never really thought of PowerPoint as one or the other. With rule #6 in place, that’s how I began to see PowerPoint. Any raster art in PowerPoint would look terrible when it showed up in a PDF version.

SIDEBAR: Here’s a quick explanation of raster vs. vector based on source material from Wikipedia:

Computer displays are made up of grids of small rectangular cells called pixels. The picture is built up from these cells. The smaller and closer the cells are together, the better the quality of the image, but the bigger the file needed to store the data.

If the number of pixels is kept constant while the image is scaled, the size of each pixel will grow and the image will become grainy (pixellated).
 
In computer graphics, a raster graphic image or bitmap is a data structure representing a generally rectangular grid of pixels, or points of color, viewable via a monitor, paper, or other display medium. A bitmap is technically characterized by the width and height of the image in pixels and by the number of bits per pixel (a color depth, which determines the number of colors each pixel can represent). Raster graphics are resolution dependent. They cannot scale up to an arbitrary resolution without loss of apparent quality. This is why a photo taken from a website, scaled and printed looks fuzzy.
 
This property contrasts with the capabilities of vector graphics, which easily scale up to the quality of the device rendering them. Raster graphics deal more practically than vector graphics with photographs and photo-realistic images, while vector graphics often serve better for typesetting or for graphic design. Vector graphics files store the lines, shapes and colors that make up an image as mathematical formulas. A vector graphics program uses these mathematical formulas to construct the screen image, building the best quality image possible, given the screen resolution. The mathematical formulas determine where the dots that make up the image should be placed for the best results when displaying the image. Since these formulas can produce an image scalable to any size and detail, the quality of the image is only determined by the resolution of the display, and the file size of vector data generating the image stays the same. Printing the image to paper will usually give a sharper, higher resolution output than printing it to the screen but can use exactly the same vector data file.

That created a big problem for me, because I couldn’t put an .AI file or .EPS file into a PowerPoint, and I had to have at least one image in the deck that wasn’t built in PowerPoint – my logo. (NOTE: You can put .EPS and .PDF files into PowerPoint for Mac, but when you send that file to a Windows user, the image will be rasterized.) Then it occurred to me that all of that clipart in MS office is vector art, and where else would people create it than in Illustrator. So I opened Illustrator and started looking for a format I could save my logo in. If you know Illustrator, you know File > Save for Web & Devices… only offers raster formats (.jpg, .png and .gif.), and File > Save as… only offers vector formats PowerPoint doesn’t support (.ai, .eps, .pdf, .svg and variants). There is a File > Save for Microsoft Office option, but that defaults to .png, which I was already using. Then I found it – File > Export – a whole collection of strange formats. Some of these are clearly raster formats such as Bitmaps, etc., but while researching the formats I hadn’t heard of before, I found this on Wikipedia: “Most Windows clipart is in the WMF format… WMF is a 16-bit format introduced in Windows 3.0. It is the native vector format for Microsoft Office applications such as Word, PowerPoint, and Publisher. A newer 32-bit version with additional commands is called Enhanced Metafile (EMF). EMF is also used as a graphics language for printer drivers.”

Look at this comparison. When I compare a simple drawing coming out of Illustrator, the files are the following sizes: JPG (104 KB), GIF (32K), PNG (12 KB) and EMF (4 KB). PNG is by far the best of the raster options, because of the file size and transparency, but the EMF is 25% as large as that and since it’s vector, it will scale infinitely with no degradation and will PDF beautifully.

There are a few limitations to EMF files. The following things don’t make good EMF files: gradients, transparency, un-outlined text, small text. The text issues are best resolved by scaling your artwork up in Illustrator until the EMF fidelity is satisfactory. Fortunately, that doesn’t make the file a whole lot larger. Transparency can usually be removed or approximated with a solid color that’s the same color as a transparent color was yielding. I haven’t found a great way to handle gradients other than applying my own shading effects with solid colors. In some cases, however the gradient can be built in PowerPoint directly and then the problem goes away.

Does that help?

Jeff Allen

I hope this helps

While I admit I haven’t spent a lot of time looking for it, I haven’t found anybody out there who just gets down to specifics of how to do the marketing job at a technology startup. So before I start spouting thoughts and advice, I want to lay down the disclaimer from the start that I know there’s always somebody <more>er than you (i.e., smarter, richer, better, etc.). I don’t hold myself up as the expert, or even as an expert, but I’ve done this long enough, I think I can share a few insights and practical tips that somebody out there might find useful.

To that end, I’ve decided to just start posting things and maybe at some point I’ll develop a voice, perspective, etc.

If you find this helpful, please let me know. That’s the only reason I’m doing it.

Jeff Allen