Have you heard the latest trend in informercials?  It’s mini-informercials of 2 – 3 minutes long that get bundled together as a 30-minute TV show and broadcast over major networks.  I received a call from one of these shows last year.  Their pitch was that they would come to our office, tape the team and clients doing what we do, put an informational spin on it and then broadcast it multiple times over a designated time frame.  They pitched it as though we had been chosen from among a select group of possible companies and that it was the chance of a lifetime.  There was just one small consideration – there would be a $25k cost (borne by Mezzanine) for them to come tape us. 

It all sounds so much like those telemarketing calls where you’re told you’ve won a vacation, you just have to pay $1000 to claim it. 

I’d love to hear from someone who’s had a good experience with these mini-informercials.  Not that I doubt that they can be powerful, I just think that a company has to be in the right industry and at the right stage of their evolution for it to work.  

For us, it didn’t make sense to pursue this because it wasn’t the right tactic given our market (types of customers and geographic reach).  When you’re thinking about what marketing investments to make, think carefully about what kinds of channels and tools will get through to your customers, and what kind of process they go through to make a buying decision. Don’t spend huge dollars on a ‘get marketing quick’ scheme, because more likely than not it won’t yield good ROI.   

At the start of every year we get a deluge of new projects. It’s usually because marketers are working on growth initiatives and they need market intelligence to build their plans. This year that influx didn’t happen until late into February. At first we didn’t know why – we’ve learned it was because many people were looking at the US economy, unsure of how things would play out, and were holding onto or tweaking their budgets.

That was our first clue that this year was different than the past 3 or 4.

But then the projects started to roll in, and we started to see another difference. The theme of projects was changing. ‘Marketing ROI’ was on everyone’s mind. Marketing ROI has been a topic for years – stronger in some camps than others – but in general it’s been a, ‘Hmmm, what do we do about this’ topic rather than a ‘Let’s do something about this’ topic.

This year that seems to be changing. Marketing ROI, aka Return on Marketing Investment – ROMI, is getting more attention and more budget than we’ve ever seen. There are two good reasons for it, and it’s great news for marketing.

The first reason is that the economy is tight – the rising dollar, rising gas prices and declining consumer confidence mean that companies are focusing on costs. We know that successful companies are the ones who increase or maintain their marketing spending in downturns, not decrease it. Despite that, cuts will come – the question is where. And while it feels like short term pain, it’s a great thing for every company to be looking carefully at the results they get for the marketing dollars they spend.

The other big reason for the rising interest in Marketing ROI is that it’s more achievable than ever before. Everything in digital marketing is measurable – and increasingly what we’re doing in marketing is digital. That means we now have more measurability. And we can’t talk seriously about ROMI without measurability.

That old saying “I waste half of my marketing budget , I just don’t know which half” is officially dead. Now let’s see how companies respond to the new landscape.