A yelp of outrage from a lady at Coke whose logic bears examination

Plus something entirely unrelated to make sure you’re paying attention

The blonde is not a lady from Coke. It is my youngest, all dolled-up for a Prom ten days ago. Occasionally I stick her picture in here to tell the world how wonderful I think her singing is.

Today she appears because four days ago she entered her first beauty pageant and won.

I am told beauty pageants are a dreadful thing and an insult to women – though that has never helped me understand why feminists tend to wave their bare breasts about at protests.

But let’s not go there. I just feel pleased when anyone I love does well. Don’t you?

Anyhow, the lady at Coca Cola wrote very eloquently in Advertising Age to defend Social Media – and her job, I imagine, since that is the area she looks after.

The piece is here: http://adage.com/article/cmo-strategy/social-media-matter-marketing-coca-cola/240444/ In it she explains that the mere fact that her colleagues had found that their millions spent in that area produced absolutely no short term sales result was irrelevant.

It seems they are looking for “Reach, engagement, love and value” as “the markers of success” – but not sales. She only mentions that dull, prosaic, unsexy commodity which pays her salary once in the piece – just to start debunking its relevance.

David Ogilvy would have laughed at this article. So would Raymond Rubicam. I have a very funny clip of Ogilvy talking to new O & M managers in which he talks about the various excuses why no sales come from a campaign.

Rubicam simply said “the only purpose of advertising is to sell. It has no other function worth mentioning”.

That puts it plainly. Too plainly perhaps. As a sample of Ms. Clark’s prose try this on for size: it’s the combination of owned, earned, shared and paid media connections — with social playing a crucial role at the heart of our activations — that creates marketplace impact, consumer engagement, brand love and brand value.

You don’t get very far in the fairy tale world of big brand marketing by writing plain English. Nor by applying logic. For it is only by isolating one element from others that you can measure what it is achieving. That is how, back in the day, we measured the impact of direct mail on brand liking and vice versa.

For what it is worth, Coca Cola may be measuring the wrong things. I have found the larger the corporation the less the competence and the more the bullshit. If you sell a drink that costs the square root of nothing to produce and thus has obscenely high margins, you don’t need that much talent.

Anyhow, social media do generate sales. We found Facebook 32 times as expensive as Google in doing so. But then again, just as research shows that some advertising puts people off, maybe having Coke rammed down your throat, so to speak, during the 2012 Olympics put you off the stuff. I know that I loathed McDonalds even more than before as a result of their sponsorship.

But let me ask you: does a sane person want to get engaged to a bottle of coke after falling in love with it? Isn’t that some sort of bizarre perversion? Setting aside the more eclectic uses for the said bottle, its chief value after you’ve reached for it seems to be that it makes you fat and damages your teeth.

To step back a moment this debate is clouded by something important. Lack of a simple definition.

33 years ago I wrote a book which is still selling steadily. http://www.amazon.com/Commonsense-Direct-Digital-Marketing-Drayton/dp/0749447605#reader_0749447605 People write to me about it regularly – one did yesterday.

The self-centred scamps rarely refer to how it reached and engaged them, or even how much they love and value me. They always talk about how their businesses grew, or much more money they made or how their careers improved.

One man at a seminar where I spoke in Switzerland in March said it has made him millions. “And I mean millions” he added, just in case I wasn’t sure. He is far from alone. One  billionaire told me he had studied it.

Yet I only started writing that book for one reason.

In 1982 the marketing and advertising world was full of excited, and often irrelevant chatter about direct marketing. But I couldn’t find a simple definition of what direct marketing was – even from the man who coined the phrase.

The way we define what we do determines what we do. If you know what you’re doing you will beat the competitor who doesn’t.

As a P.S., my Aussie pal Malcolm Auld has more on this at http://themalcolmauldblog.com/2013/05/09/coke-unilever-social-media-doesnt-pay/

P.P.S. If you like music, here’s something from another daughter, who does so well she doesn’t need any plugs from me. http://www.last.fm/music/Martina+Topley-Bird