Do they take responsibility for your results? Or just for deliverables?

No wonder so many marketers try to build their agencies in house, or go directly to production companies, or try to patch together a mesh of agencies.

How lonely so many marketers tell me they are with the sole responsibility for generating results. How difficult it is to be the only one in the room who knows what an allowable is – for my agency readers, an “allowable” is the amount of money a marketer can spend to acquire a customer profitably; it’s the limit of spending per customer acquired – how challenging to bring to the table so many competing agendas, to deal with competition and beg for cooperation, to seek clarity, cohesion and synergy and find it ever elusive.

Big agencies suffer even greater confusion. With purchasing departments dictating the internal management of agencies, agency leaders are left wondering what they can possibly take responsibility for. Growth stage clients wait in line behind the lumbering behemoths, and get the scraps. The holding companies get their profits. And the game starts again next quarter.

Alignment. Integration. Shared KPIs. These are not new things, nor are they trendy things. But there’s nothing about content, social, mobile, local, programmatic or any fact of the contemporary marketing mix that has made them any less essential to winning the game of growth with something like certainty.

Your power number is the cost of acquiring incremental revenue, whether through new customers or existing. This is your ticket to the big table. Any agency that can’t take responsibility for helping you get there isn’t an agency at all but a production house.

If we agree to take your business, we agree to get you there. That’s what we mean by Inspiring Action.

Key #2 of 10 to Inspiring Action: 10 Keys to the Future of Marketing. Check out Measure the Runway for Key #1 and download our summary poster of the 10 Keys here.

Is it possible to beat your numbers and still fail?

Sadly, in this game called marketing it happens all the time. Boards speak one language, the CEO speaks another and marketing speaks yet another.

All of this tends to collide in discussions about key performance indicators, causing marketing budgets and chief marketer tenure to suffer while companies fail to achieve their full potential.

Bottom line is, if you don’t speak the language of money, you can never be sure and you can never be secure.

So, how do you learn to speak the language of value that your CFO, CEO and Board do?

How do you come to understand how they measure value? And how can you get to a crystal-clear understanding to guide your marketing?

First off, know that you’re in the business of accelerating value creation. When you deliver twice the new business value on every dollar you spend, marketing rises above the level of finance as a tool for growing business value, and you rise with it.

But how do you determine how your particular business builds value? After years of iterative experimentation, the experts on my marketing strategy team have discovered a proprietary process for uncovering the true value accelerators for any business model:

Ask.

Alright, it’s not very scientific… but the important thing, and the most neglected thing in the area of money, is to ask.

How do we create value? Is one dollar of revenue more valuable than another dollar? Is more revenue from a customer more valuable than more customers generating revenue? Is subscription revenue more valuable than single-purchase revenue? How does the enterprise really intend to grow? How does the organization measure the value it delivers?

If you don’t know the answers, then you don’t really know what the advertising and marketing communications are for. Not really. Yet most agencies won’t ask and they won’t help you find out. These key facts are too often missing from briefs.

Is it any wonder there are persistent disconnects between marketing and other senior management? And between agencies and clients?

Money can stitch us all together, and it should.

Next up: Key #3, Mine for the Growth Blocks

Most people seem to associate dullness with success.

Perhaps this is because most of the biggest companies opt for dullness. Big companies tend to think they have more to lose than to gain, so they tend to play it safe and do rather boring advertising.

People associate ordinary work with financial success and they get the order of causation exactly backwards. Bigness and richness tends to cause dullness. Dullness doesn¹t cause anything, it¹s not how companies get big or people get rich.

Big agencies spend so much time doing boring advertising for big clients that that¹s pretty much all they can do.

Most small companies and smaller agencies do boring work simply because they are imitating the largest agencies. But if there¹s one thing those of us who build brands should know it¹s that imitation only serves the one who is imitated, never the imitator. When you read results everyday, you know that ordinary doesn¹t move the needle because ordinary doesn’t move anybody.

The rare small agencies that get bigger tend to do interesting, entertaining, surprisingly effective advertising. They get bigger working for mid-sized companies with the courage to stand out. The success of their clients tends to attract attention to the agency from bigger companies. Before long, they have a giant client representing a scary percentage of their revenue. They buckle down and do boring work, or they sell to a larger agency, or they do both.

We decided not to go that route. We determined that innovative, mid-sized growth companies with the courage to stand out aren¹t stepping stones to something better. They are the something better.

When the agency fails to measure the runway, it’s the client who gets hurt in the resulting crash.

Here’s a story I’ve seen play out too many times:

A company that measures its success in direct sales – whether through retail, e-commerce, app, subscription or membership – reaches a plateau in its growth. The board puts pressure on the CEO who puts pressure on the CMO or head of marketing. A new idea is needed, a new level is called for, and probably a new agency.

Next thing one reads is that one of America’s great creative agencies has been retained. Some months later a new campaign is the talk of the advertising community. What insight! What verve!! What cojones!!!

A couple of months pass, and my phone rings. Or my email bings. Or my LinkedIn, or Facebook. It’s the CMO, and he’s in trouble. The campaign missed its mark or forgot to sell or lacked an offer or just didn’t work and all we really know is that we just missed our key selling season. Totally missed it! They – one of America’s leading creative agencies – just didn’t get it. We need a campaign to turn this around and we need it yesterday. Can you help?

They forgot to measure the runway!

No matter what the marketing leader told that agency, they just didn’t believe that sales were as important as re-launching the brand. Despite what they heard and learned, they were sure that there would be time, that the client would “get it” after the great campaign was launched and lauded. But it was a very short runway indeed – it always is in direct model companies – and now the agency has the consolation of their awards, and we of sharing the client’s problems – and a much shorter runway.

You can build a brand and sell at the same time. If you’re building a direct model or direct-led business, you really need to. Here, we use every inch of the runway to get safely aloft.  After all, a few feet too late is a disaster. On the other hand, taking off with runway to spare just means you’re flying!

At DiMassimo Goldstein, we call that Inspiring Action, and it’s the only thing we do. My purpose here today is to inspire you and to help you gain altitude in all the ways that matter to you.

What action are you trying to inspire?

This was Key #1 of 10 to Inspiring Action: 10 Keys to the Future of Marketing. Next up: Key #2 – Follow The Money. You can download our summary poster of the 10 Keys here.

Here are some lovely illustrations from a 2000 campaign for Gomez Advisors that ran headlong into the Dot Com Bust.

Lovely work from artist and illustrator Lisa Adams.

Check her work out here:

http://lisaadamsart.com/

http://dianebirdsallgallery.com/lisalymanadams.php