Felix Wenger: Marketing’s Relationship With Analytics Must Change
Caid Christiansen•If all you’d ever worked with were traditional advertising agencies, the concept of marketing analytics might be foreign to you. And so would the thought of custom content.
Felix Wenger, Managing Director of Communication and Branding at UBS, articulated this nicely in a recent interview with CMO.com:
Marketing is becoming really content-heavy. Five years back, in wealth management advertising you had a nice sailboat, you had typically a grey-haired guy and you had the word “wealth.” Then you did the campaign.
Today it’s different. You can’t fully delegate these learning cycles. Everybody wants to have AB testing, multi-variate testing, but most of the people in big corporates and financial institutions do not have an idea what B could be if they have A.
Traditional advertising is the grey-haired guy on the sailboat. Pretty, a little bit flashy, and simple. There probably wasn’t a whole heck of a lot of measurement after the fact, either. If it seemed-eye catching and was pitched right, decision-makers could easily be convinced that a million magazine impressions were all they needed.
Marketing today is much more like the second half Wenger describes. It’s data-driven. Or at least, it should be.
Wenger continues on:
Marketing experts need to be ready to trust more in analytics than in their personal taste or in the taste of the peer group that they’re advising. It sounds quite negative but I really think we need to change people’s attitudes. They need to think data is more sexy than having a shiny thing or person in an ad.
Unfortunately, many marketers–in traditional advertising agencies, and in other settings–still like and sell the sailboat mentality. It’s shiny things and person in ads. They’re sexy, after all.
Where marketing is headed–and what our entire approach is built around here at Christiansen McCain–is the second mentality. Data matters. Having the prettiest man in the world on a sailboat off the coast of Greece in your ad for wealth management may look nice, but is it really what you need to drive your brand forward and meet your business goals?
Probably not. At our agency, our relationship with analytics has already changed. No matter what you want to do with your marketing, make sure you’re relying on data-driven decisions instead of that sexy shiny object.
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