How to speak to your client’s CFO
It’s time to start using marketing language in a way that it associates more closely with commercial value, discovers Dominic Mills. Plus: Why Spotify is where it’s at, and Facebook’s apology.
I learned a new term last week at the IPA’s excellent Eff Week conference. It’s ‘non-working media’.
Huh? WTF? You might think that ‘non-working media’ means bot fraud, ads that can’t be seen or just rubbish media placement.
But no.
It’s what client finance departments and investment analysts use to describe creative agency fees and the like – i.e. anything that isn’t related to the purchase of impressions/eyeballs etc. Obviously, with language like that, the result is creativity is devalued and media budgets over-valued.
The term came up during a enlightening presentation by consultant Fran Cassidy on how to build a culture of marketing effectiveness.
One of the impediments, Cassidy says, to bridging the gap between marketing and finance is language. Finance people, who operate in a more binary world and prefer absolutes – i.e. ‘yes’ and ‘no’ answers to their questions – disengage when marketers start talking in the woolier language of ‘brand’, ‘soft metrics’ and so on.
Here’s a verbatim quote from one finance director: “The budget for marketing is the same size as that for capital expenditure. But it has none of the rigour.”
Here’s another: “I am a finance person. I like certainty. Marketing look at – I can’t quite remember the name of it – something to do with brand equity. If I’m really honest, from a finance point of view, I don’t give much weight to the softer ones – the brand equity stuff.”
And why would they? Marketing people don’t pay much attention to ‘discounted cash flow’ or ‘weighted average cost of capital’.
But since it is the finance people who sign the cheques, it is marketing that has to learn their language.
The answer, Cassidy says, is to start using marketing language in a way that it associates more closely with commercial value.
Thus…
‘Non-working media’ becomes ‘Asset creation’
‘Brand halo effect’ means ‘Value/margin protection’
‘Soft metrics’ (e.g. ‘likes’) translate as ‘Levers to unlock future growth’
‘Longer-term spend’ equals ‘Margin defence/share protection’.
My own pet hate is ‘engagement’…as in ‘Over 12,000 consumers engaged with our ad/content/post’. There is only one response to this: ‘So what?’.
Call for the Cassidy thesaurus.
No-one wants to be the Uber of blah blah…Spotify is where it’s at
As Uber’s reputation sinks, I’m curious that Laundrapp (no prizes for guessing what it does) is still happy to describe itself as the ‘Uber of laundry services’, even at the Festival of Marketing ten days ago, or even when it is pitching itself to investors as here.
Strange, huh? To be the Uber of anything is surely is the kiss of death, even for hard-headed VCs looking for the next area to shake up. But then it wasn’t that long ago that any self-described disruptor attached the ‘Uber’ label to its activities – the ‘Uber’ of filing services, the ‘Uber’ of payroll.
No matter how humdrum the task, the ‘Uber’ tag conveyed the requisite level of ambition and ruthless drive.
Still, attaching Uber to Laundrapp brings to mind legions of Toyota Prius drivers prowling the suburbs, mini washing machines fitted in the boot.
Last week though, I spotted a poster outside Waterloo station indicating a shift. Everybody wants to be Spotify now. Thus the poster was for a service – new to me – called Doctify. And now I’m seeing Spotify wannabes everywhere: Taxify, obviously; Wealthify; Shopify. No doubt you will have seen others.
Anyway, with this in mind, I’m proposing a new service called ‘Columnify’, which of course will be like an Uber service for column writers.
Any columnist/blogger/writer can sign up, and in return they can hitch a ride from other columnists, borrowing ideas, words, phrases and, for a premium, whole paragraphs.
On the other side of the equation, columnists can make money from recycling their old stuff or, in the language of economists, maximising the use of surplus inventory and capacity.
The killer pitch for Columnify to VCs: surge pricing. The closer the columnist is to his/her deadline, the more it costs.
Hmmm. Maybe not. After all this facility already exists. It’s free and it’s called ‘Plagiarify’.
Facebook buys ads to say sorry
There’s a certain piquancy to Facebook’s use of the New York Times earlier this month to apologise – to the nation, or part of it anyway – for its role in helping Trump get elected. After all, the NYT has been shaking this story around for a while now like a dog with a bone.
But how did it choose to do this? With a full-page ad, text only, headlined ‘Protecting our Community from Election Interference’, followed by a list of nine actions it is taking. OK, an apology in everything but name.
It’s curious isn’t it? Why didn’t Facebook use its own platform to make its case? After all, its users included the duped as well as the dupers.
The NYT can’t compete with the digital duopoly when it comes to reach, but when you want people to pay attention and discuss/debate the issue at hand, you can’t beat the press as the medium of choice or as the catalyst that gets all the other media (TV/radio/social) jumping all over the story.
Go figure.
