re: Getting off at Edge Hill.....a defence of shopper marketing.

Rory Sutherland — Thu, 22 Jan 2009 13:39:02 GMT

Thank. Just got it. Bear in mind that I nearly paid the vast price premium for the Bravia, but a small remaining sliver of Scottish DNA wouldn't let me do it. Just one little sentence explaining why the colour was "like no other" would have been enough to silence my inner Presbyterian, I suspect.

No I totaly agree that accountability is not better than effectiveness - unless you define better by "helps me keep my job". The only point I am making here is that it would be wrong to tar all accountable media with the same short-termist brush.

re: Getting off at Edge Hill.....a defence of shopper marketing.

TESS ALPS — Tue, 20 Jan 2009 10:21:37 GMT

Only too happy to give a qualification Rory. Interesting that you've adopted a sexual metaphor; in a paean to the combination of TV and DM on the pages of Campaign last year I said that TV was the very best turn-on a brand could use but that without the addition of some sort of interactive medium/mechanism there was the danger of it being just a big tease. So, I don't need convincing that the brand journey needs to go 'all the way'. Our joint study with the IAB is another example of our championing of and belief in integration. TV plus search, is about as climactic as it gets.

My problem with the 'accountability' mob is two-fold. Firstly, as Richard Huntingdon argues more elegantly than I can, accountability is good - but effectiveness is better. There's a lot of conflation going on between those two words. But ,secondly, it now transpires that the much-vaunted accountability of online has been misleading all along. It's the online industry itself now saying that the 'last click wins' principle is all wrong; systems like Microsoft' s Atlas (I think that's what it's called; not an expert on this) now use online analytics to assign a value to all the online ad exposures before the one that gets the click. Quite right too. But who's going to assign a value to the radio, poster, print and TV ads consumed before the click?

Finally, you might be able to resist a Sony Bravia, but many are not. And, just as important as volume for generating a profit, Sony Bravias have the highest 'willingness to pay' of any consumer electronic brand enabling them to charge a premium. WTP is the metric that PricewaterhouseCoopers espouse as the best indicator of brand value. In their latest analysis of advertising payback PwC found the correlation between TV advertising and WTP for widescreen tellies to be nigh-on perfect. I shall send it over to you.