Who said it first?
Its authorship is disputed, but for advertisers and marketers, it has been a historic truism; “Half the money I spend on advertising is wasted; the trouble is I don’t know which half.“
Americans claim American authorship of this observation. It’s commonly attributed to John Wanamaker (1838-1922). Wanamaker opened one of the first department stores in the United States, which eventually became part of Macy’s. However, equally likely is that the author was the British industrialist William Hesketh Lever, 1st Viscount Leverhulme (1851–1925), the founder of a soap business which became Lever Brothers and is now part of Unilever. It’s also very possible it was neither of them.
Whoever said it first, its longevity is testimony to the essential truism contained within; the effect of specific adverts or even campaigns was hard to measure historically. We could see how advertising spend might go hand in hand with increased sales, but which bits made the difference? Was it the newspaper ad, or was it the billboard? Where should we do more, and where should we stop?
I can remember dealing with PR agencies in the 1990’s who were almost proud of the fact that in their view, their work, like alchemy, was unmeasurable. I always felt this was a mistake. If there are no metrics, then the only hard piece of data clients have is how much they are spending. That, and how they are feeling, become the only measures by which everything gets judged.
Digital change
As in so many other areas, digital transformation has brought a big and welcome change. In the digital world, we can track and see how each element of our work is doing – every video, blog, social media post, and webpage. We can see how people engage with our work and what they do next. We can see how this changes on different days and in different geographies. We can see the different behaviours of men vs women, or young people vs their older peers. We can measure most anything we wish. This means that we can see what works, and do more of it, and stop what doesn’t work. Importantly, we can do so quickly.
The other advantage of digital is in the size of the “bet”. In the pre-digital world, even a small campaign was a relatively big bet. Money had to be spent on creative and production, advertising space in publications had to be booked, brochures and posters produced, etc. All of this required the commitment of time and money. Even a small change might take weeks to enact.
In the digital world, we are able to start with small bets. We can run a digital ad with a small budget as an experiment. We can run five or six simultaneously with small budgets, and see what happens. We can test variations, and make changes quickly. We can see which ones deliver promising results, and commit a bigger budget to them once they have been proved to work.
Spend less and measure more
These two things, the fact we can measure results, and the fact we can make changes quickly and at low cost, make digital a compelling place to be marketing in the 2020’s.* We start at low cost, measure the effectiveness of our activity within days, sometimes hours, and we can change, accelerate, or stop accordingly.
So, I’d argue that the old maxim, whoever said it first, is now coming to an end. Very little is now wasted. Today, even activity that isn’t commercially successful provides data from which we learn, and refine our approach, until we are successful.
The question now is, what will be the big truism of the next 100 years?
~ Jonathan.
*Helping you to do this is what we do at Growva. Contact us here.
