I read something today about retail media and how people were using it poorly. It mentioned Attention and Influence and that really grabbed me.

The marketing world is on a slippery slope.

The slope towards hyper short term ROAS figures & daily sales targets against daily media spent. Adjustments made in real time always following data, blindly.

A slope driven by those who stand to profit from it, those whose employment depends on it and those that clearly don’t truly understand the relationship between the advertising £ and ROAS.

If there is spreadsheet or dashboard with figures that seem to correlate, well that is the box ticked for those that read the reports. Job done.

Much has been written about ‘Short and Long’ and its incredibly compelling, yet still it’s a daily battle for those of us advising on the best use of a client’s advertising budget.

There are undoubtedly low consideration products with massive latent demand that can build healthy businesses in a short term ROAS world, but in my experience of 30 years in the game and seeing the results of all sorts of campaigns, these are the exceptions not the rule.

There are so many categories that are hugely competitive or have longer consideration windows. This is where relying on solely short term ROAS is frankly a nonsense. There may be data, but the data is most definitely being interpreted wrongly to the detriment of the brand spending the money.

If we want someone to buy a product, one that’s been around a long time and has multiple competitors, or a new product that no one has heard of, we must influence the purchaser in our brands’ favour and we do this by grabbing their attention.

This is what the Mad Men did it in the 60’s.   Grabbing the attention of the consumer and influencing them, turning them on to products they never even knew existed and didn’t know they needed.  They told compelling stories that drew the audience in. This process didn’t happen in one day, it was a process that occurred over time, and it most definitely wasn’t linear, but you can be sure that healthy sales built over time.   In modern talk, they were building the top of the funnel with thousands if not millions of potential customers. In those days the demand was harvested in bricks and mortar retail but let’s not be mistaken the bricks and mortar were the last step on the journey not the first.

There is so much talk about Offline and Online when it comes to ROAS. Offline is largely unattributable, it doesn’t fit the short term ROAS model, so is inefficient.  I’ve been in meetings and heard countless stories of marketing departments discounting media choices based purely on the fact it was unaccountable in a short term ROAS model, it clearly had little if any worth to the bottom line.  Online is clickable & measurable and that dashboard looks amazing. There are short term ROAS figures aplenty. We can see the sales right here and now.

My head hurts when I think about this.

In my world there is a shift towards understanding that the likes of YouTube don’t really sell product today.  Thank goodness, it’s a drum I have been banging for years. But, but, but it’s a digital medium so it must work on a short term ROAS basis, it’s digital, that’s what digital does right?  We have a dashboard. Sadly, the danger is as soon as YouTube figures don’t look great in the dashboard it gets culled.  Little thought of what YouTube may be contributing to the bottom line that we can’t attribute is taken into consideration.  We can’t put it in a chart, so it doesn’t make the cut.

Please, let us stop talking about Online and Offline.  It’s misleading.  The burgeoning TV streaming market is the perfect example. It is TV but its digital (the targeting capabilities are simply awesome), so is it ‘Online’ or ‘Offline’?  It’s piped into your lounge and broadcast on that 55-inch TV, which also offers the viewer an option to watch YouTube, the legacy ‘online’ medium, alongside good old Linear TV, the bastion of ‘offline’ mediums. All three end up being viewed on the same TV in the same lounge – the difference is purely the type of content the viewer chooses to access. ‘Online’ or ‘Offline’ is irrelevant, each medium has incredible ability to grab attention and influence the viewer, but they all will look weak on a short-term ROAS Model.

Yes, we need to harvest demand that we are generating, 100%, that’s your short term ROAS right there.  However, we must remember there will be far more demand to harvest and it will be far easier to convert at the bottom of the funnel if we grabbed their attention and influenced them further up the funnel.

Right, I’m off to brush up on classic Don Draper lines for my next pitch.

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