Monthly Mavens and Menaces of Measurement

Who wants to wait a whole year for an Oscar, or a even a Silver Anvil? We sure don't. So we're giving out prizes every month. Each month we'll scan the web, the media and our email looking for the best and worst in measurement and evaluation techniques and practices.

This month's Maven is Mark Klein, an engineer who got tired of marketing people giving him squishy numbers for results, so he started his own company, Loyalty Builders, that tracks success based on customer behavior. Starting from the highly logical premise that the happier a customer is, the more they will buy and the more frequently they will buy it, Klein's software analyzes thousands of transactions for patterns that help marketers determine not just who their best customers are, and not just how they're behaving now, but also how they SHOULD be behaving based on past history. He then examines other factors such as publicity, pricing, and seasonality to determine what might prevent customers from increasing either their purchasing amounts or frequency. Check out www.loyaltybuilders.com for more information.

And the Monthly Menace Award goes to Neale May and Partners, a Silicon Valley PR firm that openly flouts the guidelines of the Institute for Public Relations, the Association of Media Evaluations Companies, and just about every other respected industry group by bragging on their web site:

"The ad equivalency of media exposure generated for NMP clients exceeds $1 billion over the past decade."

I for one would use that as a reason NOT to do business with them since they obviously can't tell fact from fiction. There is absolutely no evidence that $1 billion worth of purchased ad space has the same impact as an equivalent amount of editorial lineage. Did all those column inches contain key messages, recommendations, product benefits, visuals and/or leave the reader more likely to purchase? Chances are good that they did not. And even if they did, unless you could specifically test the impact that the editorial had on your audience, you cannot possibly call a column "equivalent" to an ad. In some cases a well placed editorial may be MORE impactful, and in other cases it might be less, but unless Mr. Neale or Mr. May has some data to prove me wrong, they deserve our Monthly Measurement Menace Award. —K.D.P.