Evolving Media Blog

From our vantage point, “Real ROI” can be made up of many different components including direct Sales Lift, Media Impressions, New Customer Acquisition, Employee Morale and a broad cross section other business indices that can be measured via surveys/research. More often than not, prospective customer data acquisition is the jewel that drives business growth.

With that being said, experiential agencies and their brand customers often fall prey to accepting UNQUALIFIED Data acquisition.  In a romantic sense, we can use an analogy of love relationships to best tell this story.  In the best of cases, the Sponsorship and Events Group at Brand X have this great romance going on with the Sales Department as the Sponsorship/Event Group delivers bundles of Qualified Leads captured out of the weekly sponsorship/event activations.  The Sales Group dances through the halls as these Qualified Leads generate New Business Sales on a routine basis and all is fine in the relationship.  MME’s recent experience included the delivery of Qualified ‘Hand Raisers’ (consumers who visited MME’s Portable Auto Showroom installed at Marathons and other Community Events) in 5 Midwest Cities across much of 2008 for an unidentified Auto Maker.  As MME delivered bundled leads to local Dealer Groups, you could say the love affair was poignant, especially when you consider that these Qualified Leads have lead to a staggering 463 Auto Sales (and still counting…) and thereby generated over $15 million in sales for the struggling U.S. automaker.  This is real love and what we call Real ROI.

Conversely, having recently visited a NASCAR Race to review an Experiential Activation of an unknown Brand Y, I surveyed a relatively solid Consumer Experience that attracted a solid flow of consumers through the Brand Experience.  While the display was attractive and included some fun experiences, the lack of relevancy to the Brand was pretty obvious and more to the point, the data capture mechanism, was reliant upon Contest Entry.  This is what we refer to as highly Unqualified Data — the kind of data the Sales Department learns to accept, only to push this to the side, as they quickly learn that the data is generally worthless.  Consumer are less interested in the product, more interested in the prize.  Data that in general leads to a less than romantic relationship and is not likely to be sustainable.  While I have no quantitative results to reinforce my POV on this, my gut is that Contesting Data acquisition lists might be on par with what the Sales Department could acquire from a Data List broker.

As a close to the story, MME did present a solution to the Brand Y and is still in discussions and hopes to be serving Brand Y and enhancing the Romance.

What bracket does your Acquired Data fall under?  Is it real love…or was somebody just giving you fake digits?