Campaign Middle East recently covered industry movers and shakers from the advertising, marketing and creative space for our MENA Power List 2023 issue and there was a strong sense of optimism about the region’s landscape for marketers to flourish.
Elda Choucair has been the CEO for Omnicom Media Group (MENA) for 2-3 years. Her favourite movie is Nobody’s Died Laughing.
Why do we need another article about how we measure success? If you Google the number of books on this topic, you will find 1.16 trillion results. Yet millions of books and studies later, we are still stuck with antiquated metrics. Why is it an issue?
With more data at hand and more things we can measure, if we continue to track the wrong things then we are creating a bigger problem.
This is not only an issue in media, marketing or business. This is an issue in life. You find it in the education system, in sports, in medicine and other industries, where decisions are based on certain metrics of success that were established on, put simply, what had worked before.
The second Campaign Saudi Briefing event of the year will be taking place in Riyadh on 12th October 2023. A variety of panels and speakers will be discussing the themes of media and marketing. For more details, click here.
Stuck in the past
In business and more broadly in economic terms, the problem is increasingly acute. Take GDP, a measure introduced in the 1940s by John Maynard Keynes at the request of Sir Winston Churchill to calculate the nation’s economic wealth.
Even though it was meant to be a wartime measure only, it’s now the main measure of socio-economic health. Oddly, it includes pollution, crime, the health costs of cigarettes and environmental disasters as ‘growth’ because they generate spending.
On the other hand, many happiness factors, which do not involve transactions, like quality of life, safety or family bonding, are not included.
In business, we measure success through profitability, but then look at the cost side more than the revenue side. We measure sales growth, loyalty and sometimes product quality although they only have a loose connection with the value creation objective.
In our industry, clients often boost their profitability by pushing their agencies to work on thinner margins and cut costs. This eventually leads to cheaper talent, fewer resources and an inferior advertising product.
All of this inhibits creativity and innovation and in the long run, industry and brand success. Costs may fall but profits won’t rise because objectives won’t be met.
In digital marketing, old habits die hard and it’s nowhere more obvious than with the eternal CTR (click-through rate). So weak is its link to campaign impact and effectiveness, it’s time we aim for something more relevant like attribution modelling, media mix modelling or the contribution of media to sales.
Digital marketing will never stop being complex, especially performance marketing, and amounts of data, we find that benchmarking becomes the framework on which KPIs are set.
Yet, it’s a dangerous route if we start by measuring the wrong thing. Benchmarking is great to compare with the average, but it’s not a ready-made measure of what’s right for the brand and business. We can’t let benchmarks force the comparison between incomparable things by taking us to the lowest common denominator.
Instead of straight jackets that restrict our thinking, creativity and originality, we must make sure they reflect the reality of every situation. The benchmarks we work with must facilitate, not limit, the bravery of our decision-making.
Why are we stuck and how to get unstuck?
We need to let go of softer metrics that can be controlled or managed, and comfortably predictable to the point of being consistently adopted across the ecosystem. In my opinion, the better question to ask about success is this:
Am I creating value? Value for the customer, for the user, for the advertiser, for the business, for the employer, for the employee, for the shareholder, for the community. Value in the broadest sense, not just financial.
We must be brave and lucid when we set our goal or destination. This means creating a KPI that truly matters to our business and always questioning the established status quo in metrics and benchmarks against your own situation and needs.
The KPIs we rely on must make sense at any point in time or situation. This clarity of thought and vision will undoubtedly light the path to success in the absence of compromise, short-cuts and easy wins.
Major achievements require bravery and ambition. Surely, success that transcends time and space for the benefit of the many rather than the few is the worthiest of goals.
“Nothing is ever as hard as you think.”
