"People who love good government and good breakfast sausages probably shouldn't see what goes into the making of either one." -Otto vonBismarck
Sometime in the 1980s ad agencies in the US began adopting the UK practice of account planning. Account planners were supposed to command all market research and represent the "customer" to the agency team.
Planners eventually became the Decider about the media plan-which media channels to spend money in and with what messaging.
As the media landscape continues to fragment and explode about us this definition of the Account Planner has become total bullshit.
No one today commands enough understanding about how the cacophony of old media, online media, social networks, search engines, DVRs, X360s, smartphones and tablets actually works.
What we have today is hundreds of little "sausage machines"-bits of media and social engagement strategies that by themselves produce accountable results. Newspaper advertising produces X results for Y kinds of products. Online advertising can raise top of mind search recall by 36% with 3X exposures over one month. DSPs can raise click through rate from .02% to .05 with re-targeting, depending on the vertical.
And then there's social networks. These aren't even media (remember?) they're communications networks with peer-to-peer, one-to-several, multi-participant, and yes, even one-to-many messages. We don't understand the effects communications in these social networks has on influencing awareness, consideration sets, propensity to purchase, buying decisions, repurchase and brand loyalty.
What's missing is the comprehensive understanding of how each (idiosyncratic) bit of communication that affects the decision process of customers. How much money should be put into what kinds of communications efforts to sell a product or build a brand? Nobody knows! Everyone's guessing.
We know that CMOs tend to invest more in traditional media, despite the fact that these are losing audiences faster than their cost falls. Look at this comparison of the cost of different kinds of media vs. how much time people 18+ in the US spend with each one:
(Source: Mary Meeker, Morgan Stanley 2010)
Clearly all this uncertainty causes a bias towards sticking with "what we know," which means blowing billions of dollars on ineffectual print and broadcast media buys.
All of these media choices-both traditional and online-are "sausage machines," that is processes that can't be tracked or explained except in form of inputs and outputs. That might be all that mattered, except today marketers and CEOs have a much bigger problem to be solved-and right now it can't be solved-which is accurate maps and explanations of causes and results across media.
You put a budget of N into a media buy or social networking program and you get N+X return on investment. No one can control how they effect an individual customer's relationship with the brand except by gross audience measures.
They are all about giving a megaphone to the copywriters and art directors of America and letting them tell customers what they need. The Sausage Machines cannot be held accountable, except for the cost input going in and some decent / not so decent / stupid set of metrics about "reach and frequency."
Again, the point of this rant is not that these sausage machines are ineffective-which many of them are-but that there is no way in the world to discuss objectively how various communications combine or play off of one another to create a sale.
If I'm a product manager at P&G and I have $100 million to spend on laundry detergent this year no one in God's world can tell me how to spend that money most effectively. The best anyone can do is trot out the most efficient sausage machines and offer them as efficient dumpsters for cash that output sales.
What we're missing-and this is the key point of this rant-is the first steps towards a predictive science of influence that can offer up models of how $100 million dollars can be spent to advance a product in the marketplace. I bet most of that $100 million won't be spent on marketing, either. But that's just a hunch.
And hunches seem to be how most companies figure out how to spend money these days to get customers in this crazy landscape in which we toil.