this is violence

It all started Thursday morning when I saw this tweet. Describing himself as “In the zone”, the author proceeds to spend three minutes railing against the concept of ROI in web based marketing, claiming that ROI is the tool of the fearful and that key to effective marketing is…something else. This type of proud and boastful ignorance is so common in marketing, it’s almost not worth even responding to, but for some reason, Meerman really got under my skin.

This line of “logic” typically centers around two basic concepts:
1) You can’t measure the ROI of T.V. or Billboards, or any number of other marketing efforts, so why are we worried about it for the web?
2) ROI is an outmoded, and what we should be looking at is some “brand new” RO_ fill in the blank. The current favorite is something called “Return on Engagement”. Ugh.

Now, this topic is a big part of why I helped found Fight, so maybe I’m a little more sensitive than others, but this is something that has affected every agency I’ve worked for, and every agency every one of my friends has worked for. My feeling is that as long as we, as an industry, wave our hands at this, we’re just going to keep fighting the battles with our clients that we always have. Until we embrace our role, and benefit, to the business of our clients, we’ll always be the ones with the shrinking budgets, forced to justify everything we do in some sort of aesthetic argument with people who may or may not have any understanding of what we do. Instead of looking at ROI as a limit to creative freedom, we should be embracing it as our single best path forward in expanding that freedom.

Looking at point 1) Can one measure the ROI of a billboard or a T.V. spot? Possibly. I would say probably. But lets say for the sake of argument that we can’t. What does that have to do with anything? Shouldn’t we be measuring the value of our work where ever we can? And besides, the web stands to be possibly the most important marketing tool available precisely because it can be so well measured. I have no idea why we’d ignore such a powerful aspect to this medium.

As for point 2) The fact of the matter is this: Every single thing our clients “invest” (or, for clarification, pay us) in, has some sort of “return”. The fact that aspects of this return may be hard to measure doesn’t mean it’s not there. Without knowing what to measure, and how to measure it though, we’re left just guessing if our work has any value. Worse, we can’t prove its value to our clients. The real problem here arises when agencies fail to ask questions of their clients at the start of projects. Is increased sales the reason your client came to you? Then you better be sure you design a program to increase sales, and then measure your results. Is “engagement” the most important thing to them? Then the return on their investment is a demonstration of increased engagement. Find out how to measure that.

Continuing to ignore the role of ROI in marketing, or worse, couching it some sort of pseudo-science, is not just a sign systemic laziness in our industry, it’s keeping us in the backseat when it comes to our role in business when we should helping to lead the way.