The Brand Champion

I attended the ANA Marketing Accountability and Effectiveness Conference last week in NY, and a few things were pretty clear:

• We are all in the same boat - under increasing pressure to prove the value of every dollar we spend
  
• There is still no magic formula. Some marketers use spend to revenue ratios to measure success, and some (like me) use a form of modeling and triangulation (spend, awareness, interaction, revenue, etc). None of them are perfect.
  
• CFO's and marketers are closer. They may not always see eye to eye on what's best, but it was clear from the panel of CFO's they understand our challenges and goals.
• There is still so much that is unmeasurable. With the number of media vehicles available to us increasing daily, it is getting harder and harder to agree on the "right" metrics.
  

The good news buried in all this, is that we are much better off than we were 10 years ago. There are more tools available to us, more targeted media at our disposal, and more communication with internal stakeholders.

Now if we could just figure out that magic formula ...