There’s no shortage of sayings about ‘measurement’. “Not everything that can be measured counts”, “half of my budget works, I just don’t know which half”…. And so on.
Measurement has been the Holy Grail of marketers for a long time. It’s the thing that validates ‘the big idea’ or the big-budget spend.
As one agency amongst many, in a sea of marketing disciplines, we’ve all talked about it, we’ve developed tools, we’ve found ways to measure things, we’ve picked holes in the ways others measure…and then we’ve imitated them.
In the world of brand experiences, measurement is hard.
Because experiences happen at every touch point and 99% of the ways that people interact with brands today happens outside of what we think of as ‘traditional media’.
So, without the control, it becomes harder to get the experience consistently right. And it becomes harder to measure what we do, because there is no simple ‘cause and effect’ when it comes to the relationship between a consumer and a brand.
Consumers are influenced by all of your paid, earned and owned media and right now, they all tend to have different measurements of success.
But from reach and frequency, to click-throughs and ‘likes’, many of the accepted forms of media measurement are based on enormous extrapolations taken out of small samples.
Over the last decade, Jack Morton Worldwide has relentlessly pursued a measurement tool that works for brand experiences. And in the end, these tools have continued to be limited in their capability to measure, been overly complex or simply haven’t worked.
Why have we persisted? Needless to say, our clients deserve to know. But it’s more than that. We persist because we are prepared to stand by what we do.
The only reason to create an experience is to add value to your audiences, brand and business; and measurement is the way we prove it. At the very crux of it, we believe that measurement equals better experiences.
Measurement can slip. It can very easily fall into the ‘too hard basket’ and it is remarkable how often it’s the client that puts it there. It can seem challenging and sometimes, quite confronting.
The key is to find a way to make it meaningful but keep it simple. And that’s where we find ourselves today.
With nearly 75 years’ experience in creating brand experiences, we started out by reviewing a bucket load of them, across a myriad of clients, in varying industries, to multiple audiences and we found that almost every single one fell into the following group of measureable objectives: raise awareness or understanding; improve perception, commitment, productivity or engagement; generate demand, sales or advocacy; and drive purchase consideration.
We can then have a much simpler conversation with the client: pick one (or two), let’s talk about it and then pick the key performance indicators that will tell us how we are doing. This simplicity allows us to be flexible and supportive no matter what the project is or who does the measuring. It simply doesn’t matter – as long as it gets done.
We can then apply the right tools to replicate success, drive continuous improvement and do it better next time.
At the very heart of it all, we believe that every experience should be measured because effectiveness matters. The only point of a brand experience is to benefit business. And the only way to know if we’ve been effective is to measure.
Helen Graney, SVP, managing director – Jack Morton Worldwide
