These are all actual lines I’ve heard, just this week, in support of ignoring the role of ROI in establishing the effectiveness of brand efforts in the social media space. There are hundreds of others. Ignoring for a second the completely arbitrary and increasing flawed notion that “social media” is distinct from the web in general at this point, each of these examples continues to point to the exuberant ignorance so many of “social media experts” flaunt on a nearly daily basis when talking about their own work and value.

A couple points I’d like to make:

1) Each one of these is used as though it were rhetorical, when in fact, businesses make judgements on these types of questions every single day. Every restaurant owner has to pay ACTUAL dollars to maintain their washroom. This is one aspect of their “I”nvestment in their business. In “R”eturn they hope this invest plays a part in people dining at their establishment. If this restaurant owner wanted to find a more solid dollar value of this investment, she could easily just block off the restroom and see the effect on her business. Whats the ROI on mowing the lawn? Ask Nike how much they spend maintaining the grounds of their WHQ campus. Then ask them how much of a factor that campus is on retention for them. Want to know the ROI on putting your pants on? Try going to work one morning without pants. Then try paying your rent once you’ve been fired. Thats ROI.

My point is this: it’s fun and cute to toss these pithy lines around, but it might be worth your time to make sure they’re based in some semblance of reality first. Your own inability to see the value in these things only proves YOU can’t measure it, it doesn’t mean there isn’t value.

2) I’d be inclined to let the purveyors of this flawed logic hang their own careers expect for this: when you devalue your work, you devalue mine too. While YOU may have to wave your hands at the notion that YOUR work has any measurable return, I don’t. But when you pedal this baloney, you make the hill steeper for all of us.

Please stop.

I not only believe the work Fight does contributes positively to the bottom line of our clients, we work very hard to prove it. When you say things like “Whats the ROI of putting on pants?” you’re basically equating the work I do to something literally any one can and does do every single day. The logical conclusion a client could draw from this is that brand activities on the social web are something that you should do, but not really consider, or worry about, or invest in. Like pants. Im not sure then how this leads to needing specialists. I don’t need to hire a special person to put my pants on me each day. If helping brands succeed on the web is the same thing, why would hire any one to help me with that?

I don’t know. Something.

The whole thing seems very conceptually messy and comes off like the whining of the prima donnas I think most people believe make up the ad industry.

Setting aside for a moment the really just terrible way the message has been tactically implemented, the over arching complaint I think does the opposite of what it set out to do. After spending the last 20 years commodifying the industry, and increasingly obfuscating the actual value of their work, agencies seem somehow surprised that their clients would treat them like…commodities of unverified value. Then, instead of hunkering down and actually trying to change the way they do business, instead of demonstrating clearly their unique and irreplaceable value to their clients, they pull a “we’re taking our ball and going home” routine.

But only for a week. Because goddamn if agencies just have 0 ability to think past the next campaign. Then, just to pour salt on the wound, they break up their complaint letter into 26 fragments, and post it all IN FLASH.

TEXT.
IN FLASH.

Way to show your clients you understand how to work online.

Here is my message back to these agencies:
You made this bed. You devised a business model 30 years ago and have been sitting on it ever since. You say you’re the gateway to the customer, you say you’re creative vision, the “design thinking”; but all you’ve been pedaling is your self-aggrandizing, T.V. based narrative for as long as any one can remember. You are, in fact, an uncreative dinosaur of an industry and this is what happens.

As you can probably guess from the title, the goal of the session was get people thinking about a different way to look at how brands relate to their audience, how agencies can more consistently deliver better experiences to that audience, and how and why we should be thinking about the business of our clients.

It is, in a lot of ways, a presentation version of this post

David Walker was on The Daily Show a couple nights back and while the topic of the interview was macro level economics, he got into an exchange with Jon Stewart that felt familiar to me. The above quote was in response to Stewart paraphrasing Walkers book asking

“what is the purpose of this plan? Do we have any metrics and goals that these can achieve?”

I think this gets to what’s missing in the strategic planning of many agencies and marketing groups. It’s easy to come up with lots of interesting ideas, but what’s the reason for them? Every time I hear about a Facebook strategy, or a Twitter strategy, I wonder if any one asked “why?” What are the goals the Facebook strategy is trying to achieve and are those the right goals to be striving for? Once you have those goals, what are the metrics you’re using to show you’re reaching your goals.

It’s sad how often I see analysis brought in after the project is finished to help show that it worked, that it was the right project to do. In reality we should be bringing this thinking in at the very start. Bringing analytical reasoning at the start of a project may get us more quickly to asking “I know we said ‘Facebook strategy’, but what does success there mean, and what does it get us? How do we measure it?”

Asking this upfront not only helps prove value to the client, it makes the rest of the project a lot easier to run. Everyone knows what the goals are and why. Designers can design to them, programmers can build to them, debates can be settled based on project goals rather than personal arguments, and everyone can bring their insights to the table and push the project in the same direction.

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.