Does It Work?: 10 Principles for Delivering True Business Value in Digital Marketing

Praise for Does it Work?

An exceptional guide on how to drive results and make a difference in the ever-changing marketing industry. The principles in Does it Work? on setting and tracking goals, executing on data-driven creative, and achieving business results, are applicable to a myriad of initiatives and will have a hugely transformative impact on how you do business.

—CAROLYN EVERSON, Vice President, Global Marketing Solutions, Facebook

Highly approachable, pithy, real and very engaging. The beauty of this book is that it’s about marketing today, not just being a better digital person. Does it Work? is also perfect for any level of experience with actionable insights for strategy development and executional excellence. That combination makes it an ideal reference book, a mainstay in your marketing arsenal.

—KIERAN HANNON, CMO, Belkin International

Marketers continue to face a multitude of decisions around how, where, and when to engage with customers. The 10 principles Shane and Jason share can truly help marketers focus their efforts in the places that will drive their business forward.

—DANIELLE TIEDT, Chief Marketing Officer, YouTube

A yellow brick road of thinking that can help leading marketers take on the fragile balance between the art and the science of digital marketing.

—MICHAEL KOTICK, Brand Director, Nestlé Purina North America

In a world with an abundance of data, much of it free, it is remarkable that creativity and business profits are primarily faith-based. Jason and Shane ride to our rescue in Does it Work with ten illuminating principles that will transform your ability to leverage the Big Data opportunity. As you go from zero to ten in the book, be prepared for your business to go from zero to glorious!

—AVINASH KAUSHIK, Marketing Evangelist, Google & Market Motive, and author of Web Analytics 2.0

Over the years, I’ve worked with countless marketers who try to measure everything just because they can. Does it Work? brings into sharp focus the only real metric that matters. By helping change the focus and conversation, Shane Atchison and Jason Burby are giving CMOs, CEOs and all shareholders THE standard against which every marketing decision should evaluated.

—JOSH JAMES, founder and CEO, Domo

How do you best take advantage of the ever changing opportunities that digital offers your brand to connect with your customer? Does it Work? provides principles on everything from setting goals, building teams, driving great creative and most importantly understanding actual business value to your organization.

—JOANNE BRADFORD, Head of Partnerships, Pinterest

Copyright © 2015 by Possible, A WPP Digital Company. All rights reserved. Except as permitted under the United States Copyright Act of 1976, no part of this publication may be reproduced or distributed in any form or by any means, or stored in a database or retrieval system, without the prior written permission of the publisher.

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To Terrance, Ron TJ Powers,

Dean R., and Scott Greene

CONTENTS

Foreword by Sir Martin Sorrell, CEO, WPP

Acknowledgments

Introduction

01 BUSINESS GOALS ARE EVERYTHING

02 A COLLECTIVE VISION

03 DATA INSPIRES CREATIVITY

04 FINDING UNICORNS

05 CULTURE PREDICTS SUCCESS AND FAILURE

06 MEASURE WHAT MATTERS

07 WHAT IT’S WORTH

08 NEVER STOP IMPROVING

09 ONE SIZE FITS NO ONE

10 FRAMEWORK FOR INNOVATION

11 CONCLUSION AND NEXT STEPS

Appendix A: What CMOs Need to Make Digital Marketing Work

Appendix B: Dumb Ways to Die: Detailed Analysis of Claims

Contributor Bios

Authors’ Note: Continuing the Conversation

Endnotes

Index

FOREWORD

DOES IT WORK? Shane Atchison and Jason Burby’s approach to digital marketing comes in the form of a question. And that’s exactly as it should be.

I met the authors of this book for the first time in 2005. They were entrepreneurs who had built a digital agency called ZAAZ.

It was a remarkable firm for the time, driven by one simple conviction: data is of value only if it delivers insight; insight is of value only if it inspires ideas; and ideas are of value only if they deliver clear and measurable business results.

WPP acquired ZAAZ in 2006. A year later, Atchison and Burby explained their ideas in a book, Actionable Web Analytics, and it won instant recognition. I remember that, in 2007, the book was the overall winner in its category of the WPP Atticus Awards—our influential annual competition for original published thinking in marketing communications.

Since then, dismissive as always of theories that have no practical application, Atchison and Burby have continued to expose their ideas to the ultimate test by putting them into practice: first at ZAAZ and later at one of WPP’s largest digital agencies, POSSIBLE. Their ideas worked, and many others in the industry followed them.

At WPP, we’ve long and publicly believed that digital media and data investment management were key areas for the allocation of thought and investment: both because of their increasing intrinsic importance and also because of the bewildering speed with which they continue to develop.

As initiators of such change—and learning, as always, from the marketplace lessons of the recent past—Atchison and Burby have now taken their sleeves-rolled-up approach to digital marketing one whole step further.

I love this book’s title: Does it Work? Three small, tough monosyllables—and a question mark. It’s a question we should be asking about every activity stemming from every part of the WPP group.

The book—again, typically—is as practical as a road map; yet that makes it sound too linear, perhaps too methodical to be inspiring. In truth, it’s a book that encourages leaps of imagination. It doesn’t tell you what to do; it helps you think so freely and inventively that you’ll work out what to do for yourself: and that’s always the best way.

And it never allows you to dodge that crucial question: Does it work?

I do hope that a great many WPP clients read and apply this book. If they do, it will be so much easier for our companies to make them even more successful.

Sir Martin Sorrell

CEO WPP

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

First of all, we’d like to thank the many friends and colleagues who have supported our ideas, challenged our thinking, and helped us learn over the years. At POSSIBLE we have the privilege of working closely with 1,300-plus colleagues around the world supporting amazing global brands. In particular, we’d like to thank the following people for their significant contributions to the book: Thomas Stelter, Jason Carmel, Halina Lukoskie, Liz Valentine, Jason Brush, Jon McVey, Brad Gagne, Michael Watts, Nick Leggett, Dmitria Burby, Justin Cooke, Adam Wolf, Anders Rosenquist, Andrew Solmssen, Paul J. Kerr, Andrey Anischenko, Tyler Brain, Alicia McVey, Ben Reubenstein, Danielle Trivisonno Hawley, Darin Brown, Diane Holland, Brandon Geary, Jessica Ostrow, Angela Griffen-Meyers, Chien-Wen Tong, Mike Reeder, Tony Aguero, Elaine Ng, Gus Weigel, Liz Fairchild, Sarah McCarthy, Tony Desjardins, Jamie Pattan, Jim Chesnutt, Justin Marshall, Kenny Powar, Krisztian Toth, Kunal Muzumdar, Lucas Peon, Laura Wolf, Martha Hiefield, and Tonya Peck.

We’d also like to extend a special thanks to Joe Shepter, who helped take our ideas and thinking and formulate them into the 10 principles in the book. A big thanks also goes to Donya Dickerson, Executive Editor at McGraw-Hill, for her enthusiasm about our book and encouragement throughout the process.

Each of the 10 principles in the book has grown out of our experience leading client work for some of the best brands around the world. Over the years, we have had many conversations with clients, friends, and industry thought leaders. Some of them were so productive and influential to our thinking that we decided to interview a number of people when writing the book. All of them helped shape its content and contributed real-life stories to support our points. In that regard, we would like to thank Ali Behnam, Andrew Connell, Avinash Kaushik, Brent Hieggelke, Brian Lesser, Chris Kerns, Chris Scoggins, Curt Hecht, Dana Cogswell, Dean Aragon, Deep Nishar, Denise Karkos, Doug Chavez, Eddy Moretti, Emily Brooke, Grace Ho, Guido Rosales, Jean-Philippe Maheu, Joe Shepter, John Mellor, Jonah Peretti, Josh James, Kieran Hannon, Lars Madsen, Marc Connor, Mark Read, Matt Mason, McGregor Agan, Mike Fridgen, Phyllis Jackson, René Rechtman, Richard Hyde, Richard Nunn, Nick Nyhan, Mike Dodd, Sam Decker, Scott Lux, Steve Jarvis, Ted Cannis, and Yonca Brunini.

We’d also like to extend a special thanks to Sir Martin Sorrell, CEO of WPP, not only for writing the foreword to this book, but also for creating—together with Mark Read, CEO of WPP Digital—an environment where we can learn, try new things, take chances, attract great talent and clients, and most important, do great work for our clients.

Above all, we’d like to thank our families—Tasha, Keegan, Francis, Taco, Dmitria, Cade, Blake, and Avangeline—for putting up with our frequent travel, late-night phone calls and texts, and everything else you do to support us in chasing our dreams.

INTRODUCTION

HOW TO SAVE LIVES WITH ADVERTISING

In 2013, we all fell in love with a cheeky public service campaign called Dumb Ways to Die. Intended to promote safety on the Metro in Melbourne, Australia, it featured a music video that listed the many foolish ways you could die. They included eating superglue, inviting a serial killer into your home, and selling both your kidneys. At the end, the video said that perhaps the dumbest way of all to die is to get hit by a train.

The video went viral. Viewed more than 100 million times, it was declared by many to be the most successful public service announcement ever. Dumb Ways to Die went on to win every major advertising award, including the most Cannes Lions (the industry’s top honor) of any campaign in history.

But did it work? The simple answer is of course. As its agency pointed out, it not only won awards, it also generated $50 million in global advertising value. It became so popular that Metro even made money by licensing it to a life insurance company. OK, but did it work?

Let’s think about that for a moment. What was the Metro trying to achieve? If we take the title of the video seriously, it wanted to save lives by changing the reckless behavior of people around trains. And initially, it claimed great success. Two and a half months after its release in November 2012, the Metro announced that it had seen a change. The biggest improvement was in the number of collisions or near misses with vehicles and pedestrians at level crossings, gushed one official.¹ She claimed a reduction of 31%.

If you’re looking for data to gauge train safety and changes in public behavior, near misses at level crossings isn’t a bad metric. They occur whenever a person or driver willfully ignores safety gates and other warnings that a train is coming and tries to dash across the tracks before it arrives. By definition, they measure recklessness. And since many more people narrowly miss being hit by trains than get hit by them, those statistics are less noisy and allow you to make more certain conclusions over time.

Unfortunately for the campaign, however, near misses did not continue their hopeful trend. In fact, they got much worse. By 2014, Transport Safety Victoria issued a warning to the public because such incidents had increased by 66% in the year after the ad was released, putting them at their highest level in four years.² By that measure, the ad certainly didn’t work.

Undeterred, Metro Trains went fishing for data again and submitted the campaign for several marketing effectiveness awards. First, it said risky behavior had decreased 20%. Then, its agency released a case study that claimed the ad had reduced deaths and accidents by 32% over the time frame of the campaign. You can find a detailed analysis of the various claims in Appendix B, but here’s a brief summary of why they don’t add up:

1. THEY CHERRY PICK. Transport Safety Victoria (TSV), the authority that collects Metro Trains statistics, tracks nine different categories of incidents. If you take those nine and start looking at different time periods, you should always be able to find something that indicates success. In fact, some of the categories did show improvement in 2013. Others showed the opposite. And if you add up all of the incidents together, they showed almost no change from 2012 to 2013. That doesn’t sound effective to us.

2. THEY’RE NOT STATISTICALLY SIGNIFICANT. We had our marketing sciences department analyze the data, and even though statistical significance is not a simple matter, the claims clearly do not make the grade. The reason is that safety incidents are rare, and the data is extremely noisy. In some of the nine categories, only 11 incidents occur on average in any given year. While 20% and 32% may sound impressive, they might only mean a difference of two or three incidents—and fluctuations of that kind are common.

3. THE VIDEO DOESN’T ADDRESS THE REAL PROBLEM. The biggest cause of deaths on Australian trains is not carelessness or recklessness. Rather, suicides account for 80% of all fatalities nationally.³ In addition, Melbourne young people have a peculiar fascination for riding on the outside of trains, a practice known as train surfing or coupler riding. The campaign addressed neither topic directly, nor does it seem to have improved matters with either.⁴

4. THE CLAIMS IGNORE OTHER FACTORS. Whenever you analyze the effectiveness of a campaign, you have to account for everything that may have moved the metrics. You can’t attribute all the perceived improvement to a single ad. And prior to the campaign’s launch, TSV was already taking aggressive steps to improve safety. In early 2012, for example, it became a partner in TrackSAFE, a national public awareness and training program aimed at reducing suicides and railway accidents. In addition, the agency has made numerous investments in safety since 2010, including upgrading technology, increasing conductor training, improving crossings, and adding fencing to keep people out of dangerous areas. All these activities should have had an impact as well.

Not surprisingly, many experts criticized Dumb Ways to Die. A former Metro Trains employee, who had worked for years on level crossing communications, declared its claims for success social media bulls**t.⁵† A prominent social psychologist deplored the myth of stupidity promoted by the ad.⁶ And a 2014 study by the Victoria Transit Policy Institute contended that safety messaging that focused on danger was counterproductive. Public transit, it held, is considerably safer than alternatives such as automobiles, but has an undeserved and exaggerated reputation for danger. Ads that emphasize that danger encourage people to use more risky (not to mention less environmentally responsible) means of transportation. Instead of saving lives, these kinds of messages probably increase the likelihood of death by other means.⁷

In Appendix B, we’ll continue our discussion of Dumb Ways to Die and look at some of the real problems faced by the Melbourne Metro. In the meantime, let’s stop being negative and examine a campaign that saved lives and a lot of them.

The beauty of innovation and the beauty of doing things is that it’s a trial and error. As soon as you move ahead, you can learn on the things that you did very good and the things that you did bad. You need to understand why you failed and then try to correct the mistake and try to avoid that in the future.

—Guido Rosales, Europe Group Integrated Marketing Director, The Coca-Cola Company

VINNIE JONES TO THE RESCUE

In 2011, Britons saw a hilarious PSA created by Grey London starring Vinnie Jones, an ex-footballer in Europe. Dressed as a gangster and snarling with slang, he demonstrated how hands-only CPR could save the lives of people having a cardiac arrest. The punchline of the ad was that you needed to push hard and fast (which Vinnie had helpfully tattooed on his fists) to the beat of the Bee Gees’ Staying Alive. It was an easy-to-remember lesson that perfectly merged message with purpose.

Did it work? This time, the answer is a resounding yes. Grey and its client, the British Heart Foundation, made that case in a persuasive white paper for the 2014 IPA Effectiveness Awards. It first pointed out that 60,000 people suffer a cardiac arrest outside of a hospital each year in the UK. Your best chance of survival in that case is if you get CPR fast. But at the time, only 25% of people in the UK were confident enough to perform CPR. As a result, only a shocking 7% of cardiac arrest victims lived to leave the hospital.⁸

The British Heart Foundation compared the UK statistics with a number of other places, including Seattle, where every child has been taught CPR in gym class for the last 30 years. There, the survival rate jumps to 50%.⁹

Next, they conducted a survey to learn why so few people were willing to attempt CPR. It revealed that fear and ignorance played leading roles in the problem. Prior to the campaign, 74% of people said that lack of confidence was a factor, while 77% cited a lack of knowledge.

Vinnie Jones struck at both of these problems. With an unlikely character, a catchy tune, and plenty of humor, it disarmed the fears of viewers and delivered useful tools for saving lives. Far fewer people (5 million) viewed the ad than saw Dumb Ways to Die, but in the year after the campaign, the British Heart Foundation identified 30 people whose lives were directly saved by it. More important, the larger metrics also moved. The number of UK residents who lacked confidence to perform CPR dropped to 65%, and the number who didn’t know how fell to 70%. Since few other major initiatives to teach CPR were under way, a good part of the credit must go to the campaign.¹⁰

In other words, both the Melbourne Metro and the British Heart Foundation produced brilliant content. In the case of Vinnie Jones, that content was effective. In the case of Dumb Ways to Die, it wasn’t. This matters.

ACTIONABLE ANALYTICS

We’ve been thinking about the problem of measurable objectives with marketing for a long time. In 2007, we wrote a book called Actionable Web Analytics: Using Data to Make Smart Business Decisions. At that time, people were just starting to get their heads around a concept that now seems to be top of mind for everyone: websites and other digital properties have something that other forms of marketing don’t. They have memories.

Everything a user does on a digital property can be—or often is, by default—recorded and stored away. Back in 2007, people were starting to look at this information, analyze it, and figure out how well or poorly they were doing. Instead of trusting a web design guru (and there were plenty of them around), people wanted to know what their customers had actually done on a website. They would then use that information to boost performance and results.

The biggest problem, we felt, was that by themselves many of the success metrics people were using—such as impressions, page views, time spent on site—were largely meaningless, a position we still hold. A page view matters only if it represents a potential customer or someone who might share your brand with others. A share matters only if a sharer has followers. Followers matter only if they are in your purchase demographic. So we argued that web strategy had to be brought into the overall context of a business. It had to move metrics that matter, not influence meaningless statistics.

A NEW START

We wrote Actionable Web Analytics when the digital world was much simpler. Back then, you had some digital technology but nothing like today. There was no social, not a huge amount of third party recommendation, and relatively primitive mobile devices. Since then, things have obviously changed. The highlights include:

∙ Data and insight have increased exponentially.

∙ Customers have become vastly more mobile.

∙ Tablets and second screening are commonplace.

∙ Social media. Enough said.

∙ The key 18–34 demographic was raised on digital.

∙ Transparency has increased.

∙ Audiences are fragmented.

∙ CMOs play a much larger role for brands.

∙ Silos have become a real problem.

∙ Big Data has arrived.

∙ Disruptive technologies crop up every day.

∙ Innovation is now a mandate for marketers.

∙ Competition is fiercer.

∙ Location data is available and important.

∙ Stakes are higher.

∙ The speed of change is accelerating.

∙ And no one seems to know what to do with it all.

As all of these have happened, our company has evolved a philosophy that’s different from the clean but narrow world of our first book. We call it Does it Work?™. It’s a strategy for achieving business success from digital efforts.

OUR METHODOLOGY

We did not come up with Does it Work? on our own. In fact, it was a process involving a lot of people and time. We wanted to make sure it worked not only locally where we live, but also included a wide global perspective. To do that, we relied on four sources of data and information.

OUR TEAM. Our agency, POSSIBLE, has more than 1,300 employees with offices spanning five continents. We selected experts from every digital field to help us understand the nuances of their work. They include smart people in creative, data, brand, social media, mobile devices, technology, innovation, and much more. They also bring different perspectives from around the world.

INDEPENDENT RESEARCH. We also commissioned Forrester Consulting to do research on our behalf. They interviewed 30 global CMOs on what they felt was working or not working in their marketing. The resulting report, What CMOs Need to Make Digital Marketing Work, appears as Appendix A at the end of this book and is quoted throughout.

INDUSTRY THOUGHT LEADERS. We interviewed and corresponded with more than 50 thought leaders, CMOs, CEOs, innovators, data analysts, venture capitalists, and more. Some came from global corporations, such as Coca-Cola, eBay, Procter & Gamble, Microsoft, and SAP. Others came from leading-edge technology companies such as Google, Bittorrent, and Urban Airship. Their conversations helped shape our thinking and our approach. You’ll also find some of their words throughout this book, and their thoughts are collected at the end of each chapter. Of course, they don’t always echo our ideas perfectly, and sometimes they disagree with us, but we think different perspectives are always valuable.

OURSELVES. Last and perhaps least, we’ve been in the industry for 20 years working with a large number of highly respected clients, including Microsoft, Procter and Gamble, AT&T, Sony, and Ford. In addition, we have written or been interviewed about digital marketing everywhere from Fortune.com and Bloomberg TV to Contagious and Communication Arts magazines.

WHY A QUESTION?

We know Does it Work? sounds a little strange for a business ideology. It is something that we follow and act on, but we use a question to describe it. If you’re wondering why, it’s because of the pace of change. Disruptive technologies are emerging every day. It would be fantastic if we knew how the world will look in five years. But if we’re being honest with ourselves, we don’t know what it will look like in five months. Not to mention the fact that it will look different to different people. The future is impossible to predict.

Don’t believe us? Every year, the Consumer Electronics Show brings together some of the world’s best and brightest minds in technology. Together, they select the products they believe are the most exciting with the greatest chance for future success to present at the event. You might think that this esteemed body would be pretty much right about its predictions. After all, they have so much information at their fingertips. Many of them, in fact, earn a living by telling us what technology we’ll be using next year. They must be good at this.

Not so much. They turn out to be vastly better at predicting goats