As global digital adspend reaches dizzying new heights, some of the worlds biggest brands have begun to ask tough (and reasonable) questions about their relationship with digital marketing, and exactly what they are getting in return for their investment.

With Procter and Gamble’s Marc Pritchard leading the charge, the onus is now on the world’s marketers and agencies to answer those questions with clear ROI and attribution data. 
Is the digital advertising industry up to the task? 

An Industry Ripe For Change

According to the World Advertising Research Council, total global adspend is expected to grow by almost 5% in 2018, buoyed by the Winter Olympics, the World Cup, and a number of political campaigns. The total number for 2018 is estimated at $572 billion. Inside that number is the news that digital spending is currently passing TV as the media attracting the biggest piece of the adspend pie. Mobile spending is the fastest growing sector in the industry, with 1/5 of every advertising dollar spent targeting smartphones. According to TotalMedia, digital’s “portion of total media spend is expected to reach nearly 38%, up from 35% in 2017, whereas, television is predicted to yield a 36% share, a dip from 37% in the previous year.” Based on these trends, we can assume that companies will keep pumping money into digital content. But at least one company is beginning to rethink its relationship with online marketing.

Proctor & Gamble’s chief brand officer Marc Pritchard has been saying some interesting thingsabout his company’s relationship with digital marketing. One article in particular mentions how, “at ISBA’s annual conference earlier this month, P&G revealed it cut $200m from its digital ad budget last year after new data revealed how many people see its ads and how long they watch for. P&G found that average view time for an ad on a mobile newsfeed was just 1.7 seconds, which Pritchard called ‘little more than a glance.’” While many companies are focused on the eyeballs attracted to their campaigns, P&G is prudently looking to see how many wallets are opened. The corporation (and others like it) is trying to make sure they receive value in exchange for their adspend, rather than just gaudy numbers on a Google Analytics printout.

Muddy Waters

Calculating the return on investment (ROI) for any online campaign is a very tricky thing to do, even for digital marketing experts. A 2017 survey of 217 marketing leaders in 19 industries found that 71.1% of respondents felt their biggest challenge in proving ROI was “attributing social and content to revenue.” Elsewhere you’ll find a variety of formulas for calculating ROI that include customer lifetime value, incremental profits, gains in brand awareness, click-thru-rates (CTR), conversion rates and a variety of other key performance indicators (KPIs). Does your head hurt yet? Welcome to the club. When you stop and think about the fact that consumers are looking at your expensive, targeted facebook ad for less than 2 seconds, that the CTR on facebook ads is 0.9% while the CTR for display ads is a paltry 0.05%, you begin to understand why P&G is looking to find new and different ways to spend its money online.

For brands and retailers to get the most bang for their buck online, having a clear sense of your goals is key. Some might seek to raise brand awareness and focus solely on impressions, eyeballs and CTR. Others might be focused on getting leads, and focus on traffic and conversion rates. If you’re driven purely by sales you’ll be targeting revenue, ecommerce conversion rates and average order value. Before deciding how to build campaigns, smart companies set clear goals, identify the metrics they need to track their progress, and find marketing firms that are willing to share the data they need to find out what’s working and what isn’t.

In the case of P&G, Pritchard identifies the need brands have for critical information from online marketing firms:

The next frontier with the big players is going to be getting a consumer signal that helps us make sure that investment actually results in a sale and that it doesn’t add excess frequency.

I want to know if I reach you, and I don’t need to know it’s you specifically, but I need to know it’s a person and that I don’t reach that person 10 other times. And that if I reach you that it actually leads to a sale.

There is a solution

P&G has been shifting its spending from traditional digital advertising to working with sales platforms themselves. They’ve increased their focus on platforms such as Amzaon, Alibaba, Tencent and JD. The reason? There is an opportunity with these platforms to gain total integration between media, shopping and data. Traditional marketing firms have spent a great deal of their resources on steering their clients to blindly use their proprietorial data, algorithms and systems of project management. Meanwhile, forward thinking brands are starting to take back control of their sales data and marketing strategies, and forward thinking marketers are beginning to look to partnerships rather than siloes. Andrew Bruce, CEO of Publicis Communications North America, recently declared that “partnerships between agencies and clients in which both entities are working toward shared objectives are key for the industry’s future.” Similarly, DDB Chicago CEO Paul Dunning announced the creation of a new agency, Omnicom Group, which will be “dedicated exclusively to McDonald’s, saying the review process involved four main themes: the consolidation of marketing services across Omnicom agencies, access to data, breaking down silos within Omnicom and McDonald’s and transparency on both the agency and client sides of the business.”

Here at Adimo, we are committed to work in partnership with our clients to deliver the digital marketing strategies that maximize ROI, no matter what you’re looking for. We will give you the tools to sell your products with all the shoppability and convenience of Amazon. Better still, we’re willing to share the data that lets you know which ads, apps, and websites are working for you by providing clear data on exactly where your sales are coming from. As digital marketing becomes the dominant mode of global advertising, agencies and brands are realizing that the game has changed. Let us work with you to ensure that your future is both bright and lucrative!