Take the long view. Except in a crisis.

There are many similarities between marketing mix modelling (econometrics) and weather forecasting. They both use data on the past to try to predict the future - though I'd be the first to admit that weather forecasting is harder - and they both struggle badly when you knock them out of their comfort zone. Neither forecasts well when they're in a situation that they haven't seen before.

Weather forecasts in the UK are, to put it kindly, struggling this week. My lovely new HTC phone brings me weather alerts and on Saturday it went from forecasting not really any snow, to heavy snow, to very heavy snow in the space of a few hours. Half an hour after it made up its mind that we were going to get some proper weather, the heavens opened and London went very white and very pretty in the space of about two hours.


There's a marketing angle coming, I promise.

I'd normally argue against taking a day-by-day view of marketing ROI. It's unproductive and it hides the big picture. Retailers especially have an obsession with yesterday's takings which is brilliant for stock control but terrible for working out whether your ad campaign is effective. Advertising has at least medium term effects and you're really looking to build a brand over the long term, so asking your analysts to spend their day working out why Tuesday was 0.5% down year-on-year is distracting at best.

This short term obsession ties in nicely with social media reporting. We're sure we need to track it - how many new Facebook friends, twitter mentions and positive blog posts - but nobody really seems to be able to explain why. If I've got an up to the minute tweet dashboard, what do I do with it? What do I change in my business?

The weather's just given us an example. Forecasts are unreliable and we're out of our comfort zone. What the hell is going on? Is the snow headed our way?

#UKSnow knows.


#UKSnow takes a hashtag on Twitter, a postcode and a report of how heavy the snow is, then maps all the tweets for you. Fabulous! It's doing better today than the Met Office rainfall radar; it updates faster and is reporting snow where the Met Office isn't (in places where it's definitely snowing!)

Most of the time the long view is the best one, but just occasionally, when our models get knocked out of their comfort zone there's a real use for social media dashboards. They can bring us information far faster and more accurately than a model ever could. Provided every day isn't nominated a crisis day, social media tracking is a powerful analysis tool.

Marketing first? Not a chance.

In return for speaking at an evening they had arranged, the Marketing Society recently gave me a copy of their book on the Future of Marketing. It was a nice gesture (and some compensation for a trip to Coventry...) You can read an excerpt from it here.

Reading it on the train on the way home, it had the usual contributions from the usual contributors, including Sir Martin Sorrell (of course) with his standard essay on how it's all about the growing markets - Asia and South America - and how measurement is the way forward. Measurement is the way forward and it's great to hear somebody with that kind of profile banging the analytics drum, but even as an analyst, I can't help feeling he puts a little too much faith in numbers.



To be honest, even with a train journey to kill, I skimmed quite a lot of it.

Two contributors stood out though, as interesting pieces written by people that I find inspiring, and also for the fact that neither are primarily marketers.

When asked "What is the future of marketing?", James Dyson and Richard Branson both replied (essentially) "Product". Then added, "It's always been product".

Get the product right and people will come back. They'll also do a lot of your marketing for you. Ask any business traveller who they most like to fly with and in my experience the vast majority immediately start singing the praises of Virgin. These companies advertise, of course they do, but it's secondary to the business of making products that work.


I was reminded of those two articles this morning by a Guardian interview with Jamie Oliver. Have a read, it's got a couple of cracking rants in it and is refreshingly sweary.

One point stood out for me.

"You know that government advertising campaign, Change4Life, cost £20m on billboards? I could have built over 100 Ministries of Food in towns all over the country for that. The public doesn't need to know that we're in a fucking state, that we need five a day. What it needs is skin on skin, it needs beacons locally where you can find out stuff for free, and have lessons. It's the only way forward"

Change4Life is a classic case of advertising without a product and it's throwing money away. He's a marketing genius that Jamie Oliver, mainly because he's not trying to do marketing.

As part of the public spending bonfire that we're about to experience*, I'd like the Tories to instil a new advertising principle. Government departments can't advertise until they've got a product. One that is already selling. Launch with a huge marketing campaign and it's too easy to take your eye off the ball and to concentrate on that campaign. Especially when (God forbid,) it's the biggest line item in your budget.


* Labour had a public spending bonfire too, but theirs was different. They just burned cash. In large part by funding daft ad campaigns.

A good cost per acquisition. If you're selling superyachts.

It's no secret that I don't like ID cards.

That said, it's time for a fair and impartial look at the government's investment of half a million in advertising money to publicise their trial run in Manchester. It can be fair and impartial and still anti ID cards because... well you'll see in a minute.


1300 people have signed up.

For half a million pounds.

Lets pretend loads of them aren't civil servants and journalists and say 1300 people saw the advertising and thought "I've just got to have one of those".

That's a cost per acquisition of £385. Bargain.

At that price, persuading 48 million adults for a national role out will cost £18,480,000,000 (yes, I know that's a silly calculation, I've stopped being fair and impartial now.)


Can we just abandon this monumental waste of money please?

The 7 in 1 media agency. With extra blades.

Windows 7 comes out on Thursday. Are you excited?

No?

Me neither.


In marketing Windows 7, it strikes me that Microsoft have got the same problem that a lot of advertisers face - there's nothing new to say. Windows XP works fine. So does Vista, whatever the moaners say. What do we need to upgrade for? We'll end up on this new one when the whole PC's upgraded in a couple of years and that's fine. Microsoft are going to be forced to invent a compelling reason to upgrade, or maybe just suggest that it's amazing and new and the bestest thing ever! without actually explaining why.

Hopefully they'll do better than this though.




It's the problem that gives us marketing campaigns for Gillette razors with ridiculous numbers of blades and my personal favourite, the Finish 2 in 1, 3 in 1, 7 in 1, Max in 1 Powerball detergent. (Seriously, the old one was fine...)

"You need new news," cry the agencies. "It's what makes advertising work."

So we invent news. More blades, battery powered, with sparkly bits and powerballs.

Fine, it's what we do.

Then I thought about media agencies. We market ourselves to clients all the time. Where's our new news? Twitter? Ad skipping? Spotify?

Remember the Red Button? That was going to be huge. Honda were using it to make interactive TV ads. If you Google for Red Button now, the only media references you get* are from the BBC and from Channel 4 switching it off. Next big thing in advertising? Yeah right.

We're in competition with each other in selling to clients and I suppose at least we're consistent; we're doing what we tell our clients to do and inventing news. Lets face it though, most innovation in marketing is another blade on a razor - upping the price but getting the same result. Not long ago, Gillette started putting a single blade on the back of their razors, because there are now so many on the front that you can only shave big areas with it. It's a metaphor for the kind of thinking that's leading us back to basics. We've actually convinced ourselves that the 'news' is important enough to take our eye off the job we were doing pretty well before. It isn't. It's a sales technique.

Our clients know it too. It's how they're driving down the margins - turning media planning into a commodity. Without genuine news and innovation, everything eventually becomes a commodity. What starts off as clever and innovative becomes mainstream and before long, everybody's doing it. In FMCG terms, media agency clients are buying Own Label.


* On the first five pages, then I got bored. But you get the point.

Unethical marketing

Some time ago I asked, "Are there any brands you'd refuse to work on, even if it meant losing your job?"

For me, cigarettes? Sure, no problem. If people don't know the dangers by now then more fool them. Alcohol? Gladly - and pass the free samples. Baby milk to third world countries? Maybe not...

ID cards? Absolutely no way.


The Home Office is about to spend £500,000 on a campaign in support of ID cards. Five hundred grand on a project that the Tories have committed to canning after they wipe the floor with Labour next year. What a waste. I'm not a Conservative, but I'm going to stay up late and enjoy election night this time around. Cheerio Jacqui.