Tim Ainsworth is Executive Director at McCann Experience, McCann Manchester and NDA’s new monthly columnist.
There is a famous phrase, credited in the New York Law Journal (1961), coined by FE Smith (the 1st Earl of Birkenhead) in response to a judge’s commen
Judge: I’ve listened to you for an hour and I’m none wiser.
Smith: None the wiser, perhaps, my lord but certainly better informed.
So, marketers, are we better informed? It strikes me that this is largely not true of data in marketing effectiveness on the ground: the proliferation of what we can see hasn’t had a proportionate impact on what we do (as a consequence).
And, I’d like to posit that it’s largely because we have failed to reframe some of the challenges we face; the methods by which we choose to understand marketing remain broadly very linear and haven’t changed much in the last 20 years. It’s certainly the case – in my experience – that normalised broad brush methodologies mask some very powerful nuance within the data and that’s where the competitive advantage lies.
The mastery of this nuance lies in what I call data radiation: For the uninitiated, radiation is where heat is passed through the air via electromagnetic waves, commonly understood to look like it is spreading through “thin air” to other items. In marketing terms, we’re referencing a not uncommon methodology called nesting: the simple maths of combining seemingly unconnected data sets to understand potential cause/effect correlations and compound impacts, which in turn can be connected to form micro drivers of overall macro key leading indicators.
DO Sweat The Small Stuff.
The micro measures tend to move proportionately quicker, which means if you sweat the right small stuff right, the big stuff will magically course correct itself. So, knowing what to sweat is the key and getting some help from tech and AI can make it happen quickly, which pretty much anyone can do now with an open browser or – if we’re going old school – an excel spreadsheet.
So, ultimately, the power lies in looking at measures across the total branded ecosystem, aligning it to performance trajectories on brand health, which then can be connected to commercial performance: revenue, lifetime value etc. I’m not suggesting this is new, but it is generally underutilised outside of the big brands that have perhaps not had access to sophisticated econometric/attribution studies.
This method can be deployed in ways that enable brands to create their own brand ecosystem health methods without ever worrying about a parochial funnel. Simply bear these two key guides in mind…
Meaning: awareness is pretty meaningless. It is a benign measurement and banded around as an objective for every campaign I seem to come across, but a) brands without brand health monitoring can’t measure it and b) those with brand health monitoring measure its impact in an oversimplified funnel approach: it’s hard to translate that into commercial impact.
So, why on earth would we ever have it as an objective?! The heat of awareness has to catch something else. Look to other measures such as reach, heat map connection points across the paid, owned and earned real estate, share of voice, impression share for markers of how visible the brand is in market. Awareness is a means to an end: what is it triggering?
Statistical Significance: Beware making decisions that aren’t backed by enough data points to reliably form a robust hypothesis across sufficiently long time series (no less than 12 weeks and compared over months). For instance, obsessing about social engagement monitoring data points under 100 is a nonsense: probably not a reliable marker of a market shift. Similarly, aggregated metrics at a national level might not be reliable when you drill down through a regional or local lens. Critically, you need to be seeing a correlation score of between 60-80%+ on some decent data volumes to see a reliable cause or effect emerge.
Ask New Questions
There’s a lot of talk in the sphere of marketing effectiveness on the power of certain elements within advertising to drive big business effects.
Remember, your whole business is your brand: the collective total experience an audience has with your business is the value of your brand and vice versa: the map of meaning connected together by the clients and customers you’re hunting/serving. So, your brand health has to be made up of much richer data sets across the brand’s value chain and across those glorious 7 Ps of marketing.
Go hunting across every touchpoint, load in the measures and start looking for those connections; sniffing out the seemingly unrelated. That’s how challenger brands such as Octopus Energy outpaced the likes of British Gas in the energy category: they just had their fingers on the pulse of a tonne more data points across their business and the customer and turned that into value.
How else will you outpace your market leader in 2025?
