How Do You Know When You’re Winning?

The reason spectators spend billions of dollars watching sporting events is that at the end of the contest there is a winner and a loser. Few things in life, however, are as clear cut as the outcome of a football game.

The question of “did we succeed?” must always be paired with the question “from where did we come?” If we’ve launched a brand new product to a national audience under tight budget restrictions and a subpoena by the government, and…you get the idea.

As marketers, however, small business owners and boards of directors are going to want to know “how did we do?” and that is why an industry was developed to track viewership with electronic boxes or why advertisers speak of “impressions,” however fleeting they may be. It’s easy to see that consumers‘ lives are cluttered with thousands of impressions, from seeing a product placed in a TV show to the discount pizza ads wallpapering televisions at dinner time. That‘s why creative departments are under pressure to produce something that “cuts through the clutter” that at least a small segment of the audience is trying to get rid of by canceling cable TV subscriptions. Get this: Huffington Post is now advertising a print magazine based on the notion of “slow news.”

Create the Counter Product

If your product doesn’t fit, create the counter product. One of the most successful TV ad campaigns of all time was 7up branding itself “the uncola.” Which says it all.

And, there are no other products and circumstances like the one we’re in now, so it’s a unique situation, and there’s only so much to be gained by studying what worked five years ago.

Once the creative side is reconciled with the business end of the product, it’s time to advertise. As the director of a political advertising effort, I saw millions of dollars spent in rather casual fashion because campaigns are fairly complex, so when a campaign meets an ad team that can “do it all”–production and ad placement–the ad men and women can command top dollar. But, the ad man offers buying smarts to plaster your ad all over 35 or so of the most highly watched cable channels at the most opportune times of day. If you’re already dealing with the title of marketing director, you probably don’t have time to play media buyer too.

Success is Hard to Measure

It’s hard to know whether the ad campaign pays off. If the product is a bust, no one is going to care that you had a killer ad campaign. If the product is a success, it will be hard to know how much of the success was due to advertising, because no one will ever say “it took a great ad campaign to sell our lousy product.

If the value of advertising is hard to measure, how about public relations? A PR person can be a blizzard of press releases and phone calls and still not get the treatment she’d like from the media, because of factors beyond her control. Perhaps it’s an unknown product, or a product consumers don’t willingly seek out, like dentistry. Although it may not be measurable in column inches, businesses have to have a measure of faith that keeping the message out there is valuable in itself even if there’s no payoff three hours later.