Kineo Australia

On Accountability

As the year progresses on its tentative path, the media bombards with news of redundancies and bailout packages, and consumer confidence steadily declines, businesses continue their need to market their offerings.

Clients’ marketing budgets, now, as precious as ever, need to be measurable in its output, and be shown to have a clear return on investment. B&T predicted that 2009 will be the year of “Accountable Innovation“. There is a need for solid strategy, innovative approaches and accountable delivery, with clients being able to ill afford haphazard marketing activities.

A marketing approach with a digital strategy at its core presents an opportunity to create real transparency on the effect of your marketing dollars. Digital channels are 100% trackable, and are able to measure any sales made directly online. It can also show you the user journey toward this sale, provided that they were made online.

This means that your marketing dollar is 100% accountable, providing a clear return on investment.

here are those that have criticised digital advocates’ very public and vociferous declaration on the advantageous benefit of digital “accountability”. There are various interpretations one could present distinguishing “effectiveness”, “efficiency” and ‘accountability”.

Without getting lost on semantics, what digital can provide is robust data (from user engagement through to actual sale) with which to make informed choices about marketing activities, including optimisation strategies and substantial analysis. When matched with dollar figures, you’re able to get a figure which displays dollar in per every dollar out. i.e. ROI.

Digital becomes also the means to create accountability in traditional ATL media.

For instance, given that our ability to recollect an ad message in the last 5 years has dropped from 1 day to 2.5 hours, what typically happens is that the next logical action from an exposure to any message is then Searching on Google (or others).

We’ve used in the past “Search call to actions” in ATL advertising generating a significant level of accountability in respect of the resonating messaging REALLY moving consumer’s attention.

Further to this there’s also another important and often forgotten aspect. Advertising exist in order to sell products, so not focusing of what happens after we’ve created that initial Engagement with the consumer is like going to the restaurant and forgetting to eat.

Consumers now are using Window shopping->online Purchase or online shopping-physical store purchase without any distinction. Creating 100% accountability means also creating that tie-in between digital and high street shopping that truly shows where the precious marketing $$ have actually gone.

So…this is really what 100% accountability through digital actually means.