Measuring return on investment - how far do you go?

There was an interesting article on a survey carried out by the CIM on here last week.  It talked about marketers making the assumption that offline advertising was the least successful in providing roi for a marketing budget.  Offline advertising, certainly for larger brands is more about sending a message in awareness rather that actual lead generation.  Marketers have to use direct marketing tools to support the atl efforts that have often done the initial brand preparation required to help the more incentivsed dm and digital marketing work get through. 

With most brands using sophisticated web tracking tools to track internet leads, it would be interesting to find out what methods were used to track the retun on investment as a whole.  That means tracking the telephone calls and using call recording to listen to each enquiry to get right inside what has generated the interest and lead to actual sales. Only then can the marketer come to a sound conclusion about which efforts have produced the right result.

But would you buy a completely new brand of car, coffee, after shave, cologne, go on holidays to a new country, just by seeing a still image on a computer screen?

It's the moving image together with sound. some billboards, press ads, print etc that goes into your purchase decision.

The bean counters can only do simple sums- that's why they like online.

Life was never meant to be easy. 

The gap has to be filled in to make any sense of a marketing budget.  Putting your finger in the air for your offline results will end up with you only ever advertising in the same places. If you add call tracking to all your offline activity and marry the two, you will have a much clearer idea of which mediums are really working to generate leads.