Marketing By The Numbers

Negotiations

He say seven, I say eight. He say eight, I say nine. I got plenty numbers left. Huh! When I start, I no stop-a for nothing. I bid 'em up. I go higher, higher, higher, all the time is go higher.

Chico Marx in “Cocoanuts”, the first Marx Brothers movie, showing Essential Marketing Wisdom

In Start Up Land, it’s very important to be able to pivot for changing market currents. Especially in Ad Tech, what makes money this year might not make money next year, and when it comes to making quarterly projections, you need to be able to adjust on the fly.

Ad Tech also tends to create new and very interesting numbers, because that is the nature of Big Data. Cross-traffic analysis, lifetime value on a channel basis, performance lifts over the control. All of it seems very exciting and Web 3.0-ish, and helps point the way to a better world of targeted buying and lead generation.

That is the good part of the business. The bad is when you hit numbers that do not matter, because, well, they help to distract people from what is going on at higher levels.

This can really come into play at a lead quality level, when you get tasks like the direction of so many followers in social media, so many new addresses for the house list, and so on, and so on. What matters, from a measurable standard, can and should get granular, especially when you have a complicated and substantial marketing program in place.

However, the core of what matters has not changed with technology, because business is not like that. Number and cost per lead, conversion percentages, and lifetime value of said leads, all of which boils down to Return On Investment, or ROI.

At far too many start ups, middle management likes to get into the weeds of measurement… and it manifests mostly as a way to cover themselves in the case of a down cycle. Sure, the company revenue might be stagnant or in retreat, but look at how many times we rang a bell, fixed a problem, made some multiple of some past quarter, or hit the turn on a dev cycle.

Except that the bell ringing might have been for trivial contracts, the problems may have been internal and never affected revenue or turnover. Or that the multiples over quarter did not matter because, well, they did not track to revenue, and the dev work was, once again, not tied to revenue.

If you find yourself in the presence of management who likes to cite these additional numbers in the case of a weak quarter, or as a way to distract or tell the story of how the quarter was mixed instead of down…

Well, you are in the presence of people who are covering a real agenda.

They might be doing it for the best of reasons. Maybe they are trying to alleviate employee turnover or panic, to keep the stock price buoyant for a merger or additional funding, to create a more positive environment so that the venture capital does not turn tail and run.

Or maybe, and somewhat more realistically, they are lying for less noble reasons.

In any event… if and when this passes the smell test, you will get more of it. Then, it will perpetuate, and maybe even spawn additional pointless metrics.

Bovine Stuff tends to create more Bovine Stuff.

It does not, however, usually create a stable, profitable, and long-running business.

Or a place you will really want, or get to, spend too much of your career at…

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