Peter Field: Short-termism is undermining long-term success in advertising
Friday, 18 August 2017
Ahead of his much-anticipated return to Australia, UK's Godfather of Effectiveness Peter Field is on a mission to break Aussie brands out of their short-term thinking.
OPINION: I hate to be the bearer of bad news, but if you listen to everything that is said these days about the effectiveness of new advertising channels and tools you might be forgiven for thinking that all was rosy in advertising. It is not.
I spend a lot of time analysing data from the UK Institute of Practitioners in Advertising (IPA) effectiveness databank, which go back over thirty years. The data enables us to examine how inputs (such as strategy and media choices) influence outcomes (such as business effects and campaign efficiency). We can look at trends in effectiveness over time and it is in the trends that worrying findings emerge.
These have been tumultuous times in marketing – a deep and lingering global recession has modified the mood of marketing and the evolving media landscape has altered the practices of marketing. In some very important ways these impacts have been very destructive of effectiveness. For the first time in the 30-plus year run of data, campaign effectiveness has fallen. It has fallen to the extent that we have thrown away all the gains made during the earlier years of the digital revolution.
So what is now going wrong with the growth machine? Most of the deterioration can be put down to short-termism and its related effects. If we measure success over the short term we come to completely the opposite conclusions about what drives success than if we measure success over the long term. Short-termism inevitably undermines long-term success.
Short-termists reach for the low hanging fruit in the market, targeting advertising tightly at consumers who are in the market right now. They reduce their investment in brand building because it takes time to deliver growth and they switch ever more expenditure to sales activation and digital sales tools such as search, which can deliver short-term results but do little for long-term growth.
Worse still, they turn away from creativity because it takes time to work its magic on the brand and sales.
At its worst, they end up with a barrage of 'timely and relevant offers' delivered through re-targeted online advertising (assuming it isn't blocked by consumers).
You may also like: