Imagine this scenario: Manufacturing wants to build a new facility that’s designed to increase capacity and decrease defects. In order to execute the project, they need $10M from management. Management (of course) asks manufacturing for an ROI model for the project.

Manufacturing’s response: We don’t have an ROI model, but we can promise you’ll like the way it’ll look.

Hard to believe? Well, it happens just about every day across corporate America, but not in manufacturing. It happens in marketing. Every day, marketers spend millions on advertising investments with uncertain (and worse, largely unmeasured) return.

They don’t do this by choice. They do it because advertising was forced by circumstance to develop the now time honored habit of investing serious dollars in untrackable media. Print ads with no response component. Big TV spend. David Ogilvy popularized John Wanamaker’s astute observation that “half of all advertising dollars are wasted. The trick is figuring out which half.”

Mr. Wanamaker, Mr. Ogilvy, meet Google AdWords and Salesforce. Now you can know. And not only can you know what worked, you can know which investments drove the highest response rates and which others drove the highest quality return. You can tune your advertising investments to your business needs.

Ad spend is shifting from Madison Avenue to Amphitheatre Parkway. Little lines of text might not be as funny as riding a chicken at a rodeo, but it works. 

The era of trackable media is here...
Major ad budgets are shifting online, and Google's acquisition of YouTube starts to make sense.