Ed's Letter - Mar08

Are you effective?

It is the start of the two day World Effie Festival (WEF) event in Singapore today and all the big branding and advertising kahunas are in town to talk effectiveness, together with some of the world's biggest personalities such as lord Sebastian Coe and minister mentor Lee Kwan Yew.

While it's all hands on deck at the magazine putting this edition out, I managed to sneak out yesterday to a MindShare/ATG event on ROI, which featured some of the attendees and speakers for WEF who gave some insights as to what to expect today.

Speaking with MindShare Worldwide CEO Dominic Procter yesterday, I asked why marketers are so preoccupied with proving and measuring the effectiveness of their investments and he said it was because they are under immense pressure to stay accountable to their Boards.

"Companies are less patient than they used to be. It's an obvious change before. The pressure for short term economic return on any investment is more acute now than it's ever been in my experience," he said. "There's constant scrutiny and constant judging and it's all part of the new transparent world we live it. Marketing's under more scrutiny and that's fine as long as we don't just do things we can measure."

GlaxoSmithKline India's head of marketing for consumer healthcare Shubhajit Sen was also at the event, and he said the main challenge facing marketers when it comes to measuring ROI was not capturing data, as most companies have lots of data, but "making the data talk".

"Driving profitable growth for such brands requires harder focus on understanding and quantifying growth and profitability drivers," Sen said, referring to the need for good analysis for any marketing strategy.

Sen was a real advocate for using data appropriately to help companies "dramatically", and his enthusiasm really seemed to resonate with the crowd.

The insights I got from this event, coupled with one from a few days before by Marketing Insights (a new event format led by Marketing magazine's events team) on using bringing a local CRM strategy regional, have reinforced the message that data analytics and measurement cannot remain in shadows and HAVE to be given a lot more prominence in the marketing mix.

Check out the feature on ‘Organising chaos in response marketing' on page 54 in this edition for more on what forward thinking companies are doing in the direct and interactive marketing field.

And now I'm off to the WEF!

Debbie Cai

editor