More insanity from the land of big bucks and no sense
Which of us cannot marvel at the half-baked rubbish that passes for thinking in the wild and wacky world of marketing?
Last week I read “Kristof Fahy, the chief marketing officer at William Hill, reckons marketers should stop obsessing over ROI and, instead, trust their intuition”.
Fahy was talking at Marketing’s Mobile 2014 conference in a session about proving the ROI of a mobile marketing strategy. His conclusion seems to be “don’t bother”.
I guess if you work in an industry – gambling – where all your customers are fools it doesn’t matter if you’re as witless as they are.
But I do wonder by what demented thinking process Mr. Fahy arrives at his conclusion. And he was not alone: he had an ally in Nick Buckley, head of global mobile marketing at Sony Mobile.
It could be churlish to suspect that for both of them life would be a great deal less easy if they had to justify what they get paid to do on the normal commercial basis of profit and loss
They both acknowledged evaluating the ROI of mobile marketing was important, but said it was equally important to use intuition and instinct.
Fahy said: “There was an interesting fight we had internally. A heated debate between the people who are ROI-mental and the people like me, who said, ‘Look at the people sitting around this table using their mobiles’.
“Look at what our customers are doing and follow them. Sometimes you won’t have all the tricks – don’t wait for ROI; just get on with it.”
Get on with what exactly? One of the things I would be interested in customers doing is, are they buying as a result of our messages on their mobiles? How, otherwise, when you’ve got on with whatever it is you fancy doing, will you know if it worked or not compared with something else?
So Mr. Fahy isn’t keen on marketers having to prove ROI and always speak in terms of measurability. I imagine that seems a little too like commonsense.
I guess his bosses say, “Hey, Fahy, baby, don’t worry about whether it makes any money or not – just spend away on whatever you fancy. We’re in the gambling business”.
He confessed that William Hill is not as good as it could be on tracking (translated: we have no idea WTF our money is producing) but he knows that mobile is a “very important channel for us”.
But he does not dismiss measurement outright.
“If we can get those metrics more established and pushed through to the business, that’s brilliant, but right now it’s about getting the customers in and using the channel.
“People get obsessed with how much budget gets allocated. It’s bullshit. We will spend less as a business on press [advertising] this year and more on mobile.”
Anyhow if mobile didn’t work, he added, the firm would reallocate its media spend. Translated as: there’s buckets of cash for people like me to throw around based on our intuition and if a few hundred thousand are wasted, who cares? – my bosses are too lazy or incompetent to make me justify my intuitive antics.
His greatest classic: “It’s a bit of a grey area, isn’t it? Where the sale comes from – it doesn’t really matter, does it?”
It would be if you were paying, Mr. Fahy.
If you can’t measure it, you can’t manage it.
