Doing something different has not been Standard Operating Procedure (SOP) for a long time.
Marketing Mix Modeling (MMM) turned out to be the essential for C Suites over the past three decades in rationalizing their marketing decisions. MMM is not conducive to doing anything rapidly, nor differently. "Bayesian Priors" is a fancy name many marketing modelers use to mean "last year's MMM results", meaning that new MMM analyses are anchored to year-ago MMMs. MMM is a methodology that encourages tweaking around the edges rather than doing anything differently.
Which is not to say discard MMM. However, it is not going to be very useful right now in the crisis we are in. All of the slowly accumulated benchmarks and baselines are out the window. The 104-week gestation period is inimical to companies' survival.
Are we being dramatic? Obviously not, based on a quick study of what Coca-Cola is doing. A complete reorganization globally, 200 brands on the chopping block, the 200 brands being kept reorganized into a new reporting structure designed to "bring marketing closer to the consumer" with a new emphasis on innovation.
The NY Times quotes Coke's CEO, James Quincey, saying the company is "reassessing our overall marketing return on investment on everything from ad viewership across traditional media to improving effectiveness in digital."
Is Coke an exception? Hardly. This is the new normal: COVID accelerates all trends. The race is to the swift. All companies will be making fast and spectacular changes. The CEOs know what will happen to them if they play the slow and steady game as revenues plummet. The prospect of personally losing tens of millions of dollars a year has a wondrous way of focusing the mind.
What form of research can be used in such a novel, high-risk situation? There is only one that provides the necessary certainty. That is Random Control Trials (RCTs) – the way science itself distinguishes real effects from "magical thinking." The way the vaccines are being tested. No medical scientist is going to use a correlation study to develop a vaccine.
Getting the right answer about "what works" in the marketing mix has never been a question that risked human lives, which explains why advertising has been slower to adopt such scientific best practices compared to industries such as pharmaceuticals, food production and manufacturing. But the prospect of life and death for many companies themselves is too real today to ignore the advantage of certainty in knowing which advertising tactics are ROI positive or negative.
This is indeed an important part of the reason why the Advertising Research Foundation (ARF) came out with its RCT21 program in the midst of COVID-19, to help marketers make big decisions with the absolute minimum of risk. Marketers already using RCTs (such as D2Cs) may feel they do not need the training, but even they are generally not using RCTs across digital and television, typically it's just digital. And practically all D2Cs when they reach a certain stage have realized they cannot get to the next level without adding TV.
We see RCT21 as the cheapest way to quickly go back to school to be able to add cross-platform RCT expertise to the marketer's arsenal. In other times maybe that would just be a nice to have. But now when doing something different is a necessity, it's obvious that some of these big new and different things will succeed and others will fail spectacularly. RCT can discriminate the one from the other before jumping off. Using the RCT litmus paper before making public the big changes is prudent business process.
Rick Bruner is CEO of Central Control, which helps companies run randomized experiments for advertising ROI. RCT21 is an initiative of the ARF with 605, Central Control, and Bill Harvey Consulting.
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