Advertising as we know it has been in trouble for quite a while now. Entrepreneurs have known that for quite a while. In the era of accountability thanks to the Internet’s CPA/PPC, advertisement still gets away with promises and “eyeballs” but no measured results.
Of course ad executives will reply with confusing terms like recency (reach + frequency) and tired taglines like “building the brand by increasing mindshare”.
Mark Stevens has a great book on this and related issues in his excellent book “Your Marketing Sucks”
The principle of the book is pretty simple: if you spend $ 1.00 on an advertising effort, it should returns at least $ 1.01 to your bottom line, not including the $ 1.00 spend so that your net income will increase by at least 1 penny. And I agree! Of course it should not be true for EVERY single effort, but it should be true as a whole. If your entire marketing+advertising+sales+branding+whateveryoucanttocallit efforts don’t return their own expenses plus something . . . you are selling dollar bills for 90 cents!
What is really peculiar is that while the Advertising industry is in denial, and are doing their best to spin news (they are great at spinning), it’s quite amusing to observe that AdWeek, in order to cut costs, is no longer weekly, but it will be only be published 36 times per year. Link: AdWeek Changes Weekly Publishing Schedule.
