Search results for: “"Les Binet"”

  • Share of search volume

    Les Binet did some sterling work thinking about share of search volume as part of his ongoing work looking at marketing effectiveness.  

    Les Binet

    In order to understand share of search volume, we have to go back to 1990 when former advertising veteran and professor John Philip Jones[i] published a paper in the Harvard Business Review[ii] and a subsequent book[iii].

    Jones’ research around the linkage between advertising and sales by looking at advertising including tools of his invention STAS (short term advertising strength)[iv] and AIC (advertising intensiveness curve). One of Jones’ key findings was the linkage between a brand’s share of voice and its market share. One of the biggest predictors of brand growth was ESoV (excess share of voice). ESoV is when a brand has a share of voice in excess of the proportion needed to maintain its market share. 

    During economic good times this might be down to an increase in brand building marketing spend, not only advertising and public relations, but also influencer and sports sponsorships with variable[v] results. 

    During recessionary times[vi], it might be maintaining brand building marketing spend when the competitors are cutting back. 

    Part of this brand building work overlaps with increasing marketing penetration through increasing the number of places where the brand is available. During the 95 percent of time that you are not in a buying mindset when you pass a product display in a supermarket it’s a billboard – doing the brand building work. 

    Jones’ findings were later validated by Peter Field and Les Binet’s work on marketing efficiency[vii], and in the summation of research[viii] from the Ehrenberg-Bass Institute for Marketing Science by Byron Sharp. 

    Share of search volume

    The clever thing that Les Binet[ix] did with share of search volume[x] was find it as a predictor on the likely time when ESoV was likely to impact with a growth in market share AND, he found that the share of search volume change mapped neatly on to market share change.  

    The challenge is that different sectors have different times between a change in share of search volume and the corresponding change in market share[xi].   

    “For mobile phone handsets, Binet further ventured, share of search leads market share “by about six months” as a performance indicator – offering marketers a chance to adapt their strategies if needed if a decline is expected.

    “If the brand … had access to the share of search data at the time, it would have had a six-month warning that share of market was about to turn around,” Binet said. “That’s an incredibly useful metric.”

    Share of search’s predictive quality for energy brands, Binet explained, was noticeably shorter, at just “nought to three months.”

    For automakers, by contrast, share of search anticipates market share by “nine to 12 months,” he said – a significant timeframe for marketers to potentially refine strategies.

    Breaking out data for Volkswagen, the auto marque, provided corroboration that sales forecasts based on share of search “are incredibly close to what actually happened,” Binet said.”

    Search considerations

    Much earlier in my career I worked on the Yahoo! Search business, back when the company had its own search technology and sold its own search advertising. One of the things that we found was that while overall search volume could be modelled accurately for the year based just on January’s search data – unexplained search volume peaks still needed to be ironed out by looking at rolling three-month values instead. 

    I found it interesting that Binet’s findings didn’t seem the same degree of ‘peakiness’ and was a much more valuable predictor once the time lag factor between share of search volume and market effects were known. 

    Share of search makes sense from a logical perspective. Many below-the-line activities have been focused on search in terms of aiding SEO to increase share of market opportunity, rather than an explicit appreciation of the impact on the share of search volume and consequently change in market share. My friend James Warren used to talk about public relations and related earned media activities such as organic social media as ‘offline SEO’. This thinking was incorporated into Interpublic’s ‘inline’ concept[xii].

    Future search

    Share of search volume is complicated by a number of factors that are down to changing consumer behaviour. 

    Google’s focus on mobile upended the precision that we could search with and what we could search for, out went Boolean operators that could track down a highly relevant web page from 12 years ago. But we could now find the nearest coffee shop with wi-fi. YouTube[xiii] due to its explanatory content became the second largest search engine globally (excluding China). 

    A good deal of product search has migrated to sites like eBay, Walmart[xiv] and Amazon[xv]. Part of the reason being is that their site search is good enough, they have a wide range of stock and speedy delivery. Amazon also benefits from Amazon Prime which drives customer purchase, but isn’t without controversy[xvi].

    Social and generative AI have unlocked new challengers to Google. Search on social platforms has become the go-to approach for many young people. Google acknowledged this when asked by Business Insider[xvii].

    “we face robust competition from an array of sources, including general and specialized search engines, as well as dedicated apps.”

    The move to social is about tapping what we called back in my Yahoo! days ‘knowledge search’[xviii]. Search startups like Gigabrain have tried to tap into this market by providing a better search function of Reddit forums. 

    Finally, the move towards consumer usage of generative AI tools based on large language models has created new competitors to Google including Perplexity and ChatGPT Search. Google itself has adopted LLMs in its own search offering and seen an increase in both revenue and profit from search advertising[xix].

    Share of model vs. share of search volume

    In order to try and understand new LLM-driven search, innovator agencies like Jellyfish and Deft[xx] have looked towards understanding share of model. Share of model tries to understand how LLMs perceive a given brand, in a similar way to the way SEO rankings held a similar place in search engine marketing. Like SEO, they look to understand whether the brand has sufficient optimisation of their digital properties to feature in recommendations by the models. 

    What share of model doesn’t give us is the consumer insight provided by share of search volume. Share of search volume is consumer behaviour driven and advertising influenced; share of model is algorithmic behaviour driven and training influenced. 


    [i] John Philip Jones profile (United Kingdom) WARC

    [ii] Jones, J.P., (1990) Ad Spending: Maintaining Market Share (United States) Harvard Business Review

    [iii] Jones, J.P. (1995) When Ads Work: New Proof That Advertising Triggers Sales (United States) Jossey Brass

    [iv] Hansen, F., Olsen, J.K. STAS and Other Short Term Advertising Effect Measures (United Kingdom) WARC

    [v] Siu, A. (February 2025) The Honey scandal is a ‘wake-up call’ for the creator industry’s affiliate partnerships

    [vi] (2023) The power of excess share of voice (United Kingdom) Thinkbox

    [vii] Binet, L., Field, P. (2013) The Long and the Short of it: Balancing Short and Long-Term Marketing Strategies (United Kingdom) Institute of Practitioners in Advertising

    [viii] Sharp, B. (2010) How Brands Grow: What Marketers Don’t Know (United Kingdom) Oxford University Press

    [ix] (2020) Share of search can predict market share (United Kingdom) WARC

    [x] Binet, L. (2021) Share of Search (United Kingdom) Les Binet channel on YouTube

    [xi] (2020) Share of search can predict market share (United Kingdom) WARC

    [xii] Warren, J. (2008) Back to school (United Kingdom) PR Week (republished on PR 2.0)

    [xiii] (2010) YouTube Revenue Approaching $1 Billion Per Year [REPORT] (United States) Mashable

    [xiv] Levin, M.R., Lowitz, J.N. (November 2020) Grocery Drives Walmart Online Orders (United States) Consumer Intelligence Research Partners LLC (CIRP)

    [xv] Evans, B. (2023) Retail, search and Amazon’s $40bn ‘advertising’ business (United Kingdom) Benedict Evans

    [xvi] Stoller, M. (2021) Amazon Prime Is an Economy-Distorting Lie (United States) BIG by Matt Stoller

    [xvii] Delouya, S. (2022) Nearly Half of Gen Z Prefers TikTok and Instagram Over Google Search (United States) Business Insider

    [xviii] Carroll, G.M.S. (2021) Yahoo Answers (United Kingdom) renaissance chambara

    [xix] Morris, S. (2025) Alphabet shares gain as Google search boots profits (United Kingdom) Financial Times

    [xx] Crocombe, I. (2025) Share of Model (United Kingdom) Deft

  • Apple Intelligence delayed + more

    Apple Intelligence delayed.

    Apple announced that features showcased during the 2024 WWDC enhancing Siri would be delayed. Apple Intelligence delayed represents a serious breach of trust for Apple’s early adopters and the developer community. On its own whilst that’s rare from Apple, it’s survivable.

    Sad Mac icon

    Apple has made other FUBARs: the Newton, some of the Performa model Macintosh computers in the 1990s, the Apple Pippin, Apple QuickTake cameras and the Apple Cube computer from 2000.

    The most recent game-changing product has been the AirPod series of headphones which have become ubiquitous on the tube and client video calls. But there has been a definite vibe shift around perceptions at Apple.

    • Recent product upgrades to the MacBook Air were given a muted welcome. Personally I think Apple came out with a banger of a product: the M4 processor in the MacBook Air M1 form-factor at the Intel MacBook Air price of $999.
    • The Vision Pro goggles are at best a spoiler on the high-end market for Meta’s VR efforts, and an interesting experiment once lens technology catches up with their concept. At worst they are a vanity project for Tim Cook that have a very limited audience.
    • Conceptually Apple Intelligence told a deceptively good story. Let others develop the underlying LLMs that would power Apple Intelligence. This solution is partially forced on Apple due to the mutually exclusive needs between China and its other markets. But it also meant that Apple had a smaller AI challenge than other vendors. On-device intelligence that would work out the best way to solve a problem and handle easier problems without the latency of consulting a cloud service. More complex problems would then be doled out to off-device services with privacy being a key consideration. The reality is that Apple Intelligence delayed until 2027 because of technical challenges.

    Key commentary on the Apple Intelligence delay:

    Chungking Express.

    One of my most loved films is Chungking Express directed by Wong Ka wai. It was one of the reasons that I decided to take up the opportunity to live and work in Hong Kong. This YouTube documentary cuts together some of the oral history about the making of the film. The story of the production is nuts.

    Drone deliveries

    Interesting documentary by Marques Brownlee on the limited use cases and massive leaps in innovation going into drone delivery systems.

    Effective Marketing for Financial Services

    Les Binet presents a financial services-specific view on marketing effectiveness. It has some interesting nuances, in particular how brand building is MORE important in subscription services.

    Tony Touch set

    Tony Touch did a set for Aimé Leon Dore. It’s an impeccably programmed set.

    LUCID Air focus on efficiency

    It’s rare to hear the spokesperson for an American car company quoting Colin Chapman’s design philosophy – which he shared with Norman Foster.

  • Warped media constructs

    Where did warped media constructs come from?

    Warped media constructs as an idea originated from a few observations I made. The first was an article by Magic Numbers that examined the distribution of marketing spend across various media channels compared to the percentage of profit they generate. It was based on a piece of research done called Profit Ability 2.

    A chart in the article caught my attention. While all channels contribute to profit, some have more comprehensive long-term effects than others. Any channel below (or to the right of) the red line represents a greater proportion of contribution to overall profit returns than the proportion of the marketing budget allocated to it.

    profit ability 2

    Based on this chart: linear television, radio and podcasts and print advertising offer the best value for money for businesses.

    What’s interesting is that two out of three of these channels are viewed as legacy media that brands are keen to move away from. When I worked at Unilever, the global media spend for the brands I managed amounted to about 92 per cent on television advertising. Some markets allocated even higher percentages.

    The second influence for this post on warped media constructs was a post by Tom Goodwin.

    Goodwin spent the best part of a decade working in senior roles for media buying businesses in very technology-centred roles.

    It’s only just dawned on me that the reason Traditional Advertising is quite good and Digital ads are uniformly terrible is this.

    Media owners always knew they were in the business of selling eyeballs.

    Digital media companies think they are in the business of selling clicks.

    Our core competence becomes how we see the world.

    If you were a traditional media owner , your “job” was to attract , to respect , to inform, to tantalize, to satiate attention and repeat business

    If you were a digital media owner, you were a tech company using algorithms to trick, harass, optimize, chase , game, attention by trying out any one of Billions of bits of content , made for free by users.

    So while TV companies and traditional media owners are selling attention and eyeballs.

    Digital media companies are selling clicks and data that show they create success.

    The philosophy of traditional media is actually far more useful for longer term business success with advertising

    For MOST companies of any scale, taste and longevity, digital media thinking is entirely wrong

    But tech thinking swayed the market , they became so dominant and valuable, and profitable, nobody has the balls to call out how dumb this actually is and how much it’s degraded advertising.

    I just wish we could apply the thinking of traditional media , the need to respect , to seduce , to value , to reward human attention , to digital media , because that’s where most people spend ALL of their time.

    Tom Goodwin on LinkedIn

    His post made me wonder about why such warped media constructs were widespread, when the flaws of lower performing media were readily apparent?

    What does the data tell us about media?

    The Profit Ability 2 research is a robust study of the UK media market. It took data from five media buying agencies looking at 141 brands in 14 sectors. it was based on a three-year media spend (2021-2023) and across ten media channels. Over a third of the brands matched pre-and-post COVID.

    Retail media is one area that I would have liked to see examined in a bit more depth, given its rising popularity and ability to challenge generic PPC and online display advertising.

    Media that is often the most lionised and championed by media agencies, notably paid social and programmatic display media were outshone by media types that have been declining investment by marketing teams over the past two decades.

    This isn’t a new phenomenon as Ebquity research back in 2018, showed that there was a considerable gap between what marketers and agencies thought were effective, versus real-world evidence.

    perception vs reality

    Secondly, this data indicates that brands are not using the channels in the best way for the long term interests of their business. There is also a correlation with declining campaign effectiveness rates.

    Why do we have warped media constructs?

    This pivot towards warped media constructs has benefited everyone but advertising agencies. And it would be reasonable to hypothesise that agencies chasing incremental growth, enterprise software vendors and consultancies have been leading large corporates up a digital focused route that provides data and efficiency at the expense of effectiveness and marketing ROI.

    Agencies’ legacy businesses are fading as the vast majority of
    incremental marketing spend is directed online. Digital growth is
    accruing to leading publishers, enterprise software and consultancy
    firms, while technology enables marketers to do more in-house.
    Market share loss is already evident in slower organic growth, but
    trading multiples fail to recognise the heavy dependence on M&A.
    Fragmentation. Almost 80% of every incremental advertising dollar spent globally accrues to digital. As their legacy traditional media businesses are fading, agencies are failing to capture digital growth, resulting in a lower market concentration in favour of new entrants empowered by technology

    Redburn Atlantic (equity research paper): Ad Agencies Marginalised (2016) by Bianca Dallal, Matt Coupland and Mandeep Singh.

    Advertising industry commentator Michael Farmer alluded to this change in his newsletter Madison Avenue Insights back in 2020.

    Creative agencies have mastered the requirements of integrated campaigns, from TV to online video, websites, Facebook, Instagram, ad banners and e-mail marketing. It’s a pity, then, that this victory is being undermined by agency price-cutting strategies that leave agencies understaffed and underpaid. Senior agency executives need to create winning business practices – they’re losing the business war.

    Madison Avenue Insights | Creative agencies: winning the battle but losing the war

    Platforms like Facebook have repeatedly tried to prove that they can substitute for linear TV in advertising campaigns since the late 2000s with varying degrees of success.

    The Devil is in the details.

    Remember the question about what the data tells us about media? Let’s examine the data in more detail.

    One of the key phrases on the slide plotting out the different media sources is ‘full profit returns’. This term is quite important to bear in mind. Consider how these media channels work.

    Long-term memory model or brand-building channels

    • Linear television adverts
    • BVoD (Broadcaster Video on Demand)
    • Radio and podcasts
    • Cinema
    • Online video
    • Print advertising

    Good brand building content that we are sufficiently exposed to can stay with us for decades and even become part of culture.

    Short-term brand activating channels

    • Generic PPC (Pay-Per-Click)
    • Paid social
    • Display advertising

    This means that once you have clicked on the ad and gone to a destination, the advertisement has largely had its effect.

    The Long and the Short of it

    Now if we look at the performance of these media types over full payback, sustained payback and immediate payback we see that each these media channels serve short-term or longer-term goals. Time matters, Profit Ability 2 found that 58 percent of advertising’s total profit generation happens after the first 13 weeks.

    If you are a digital-first organisation, or looking at ‘last-touch’ attribution, your measurement is capturing less than 40 percent of profit generated by advertising depending on the marketing mix of the campaign. Your organisation’s marketing culture could be leaving substantial marketing generated profits unharvested with an overly short term focus and less efficient over longer timelines than a financial quarter.

    Binet and Field established some useful heuristics for thinking about marketing spend, which can help shape media choices from a macro perspective of brand-building and brand-activating activities.

    full sustained immediate
    • Immediate payback – profit derived in the same week as the advertising.
    • Sustained payback – profit derived from week 14 to 2 years of advertising.
    • Full payback – profit derived over the full 2 year period.

    Anything above the yellow line makes a positive contribution relative to the proportion of marketing investment. Linear television works when used consistently and has a long-term impact.

    Paid social media is about achieving immediate results, being a very tactical channel by nature.

    Print advertising is unique in serving equally well across immediate goals, sustained campaigns, and delivering long-term results.

    Each media channel can play its role based on the communication objectives. Their effectiveness also depends on how they work together.

    A second consideration is the channel’s reach in the population. Print is interesting as a universal channel for consumers who read print publications, from older Telegraph readers to Monocle magazine-toting hipsters. However, it’s less useful if you’re looking to reach a football-mad teenager. Ebiquity in its analysis of Profit Ability 2 talks about a related concept called saturation:

    The study analysed the saturation point for each channel, which is the last point where every pound invested in a channel generates at least £1 profit.

    It found that TV has the highest saturation point. Advertisers can increase investment in TV to a higher level than other media and it will continue to generate a profitable return.

    Based on immediate payback (i.e. payback within one week of investment), Linear TV advertising on average hits saturation at the highest spend level – £330,000 – nearly triple the equivalent scale of the next largest channel (Print) and over 8-times the scale of Online Video.

    Profit Ability 2: The new business case for advertising | Ebiquity

    Reflecting on my experience at Unilever: I wasn’t brought in to help digitise the marketing mix away from television because digital was an ineffective channel, but because linear television wasn’t as good a platform for reaching busy young mums as it had been previously. We had to broaden the media mix to reach them, which meant more investment in online video and paid social media.
    In retrospect, we focused on reach, deprioritising consideration of the communication objectives. BVoD, radio, and podcasts might have had greater weighting if I were to do it again.

    This might all change

    If a channel became more expensive, you would get less value for your money; it would be equivalent to raising the yellow line. Conversely, reducing the cost of the media would be equivalent to lowering the yellow line.

    Cost inflation

    Price inflation for larger clients likely endangers cinema, display advertising, online video and BVoD in client budgets first. There may be a strong case at present to allocate more spend to channels that would encourage branded searches, to improve the effectiveness of a reduced PPC spend. Examples of these channels would include public relations, print advertising and television.

    Job to be done / payback period
    SOTD: Eau Sauvage

    An emergency locksmith will have a very different budget and timeline for marketing return compared to an aftershave brand. The emergency locksmith wants to rank top in local search on mobile devices to get a call-out; they are far less likely to consider brand building and word-of-mouth. The exception to this rule would be at the top of the market, like Banham in central London, which would be providing more of a concierge security service.

    Regulation

    I have worked with pharmaceutical clients where most of the communications we were doing had to be addressed directly to healthcare professionals. In that case, you have a much more limited palette of possible communication channels.

    Silk Cut cigarette ad

    You face a similar situation if you are looking to market regulated consumer products like sports betting, gambling, alcohol, cannabis and tobacco-related products or vapes. The channel limitations are based on screening off protected audiences or reducing the chance of positive brand attributions. Regulators don’t want smoking to appear cool.

    The Cholmondeley Pageant of Power 2009

    So what’s the best media channel based on our warped media constructs?

    It depends. The good news is that all advertising channels analysed in Profit Ability 2 generated a positive payback from advertising when sustained effects are accounted for.

    You can find similar posts here.

    More information

    How Brands Grow: What Marketers Don’t Know by Byron Sharp.

    Madison Avenue Insights | Creative agencies: winning the battle but losing the war

    Profit Ability 2: Thinkbox report, Ebiquity write up, The new business case for advertising presentation.

    What the latest effectiveness stats reveal about moneyball media choice | Magic Numbers.

    The Long and the Short of it: Balancing Short and Long-Term Marketing Strategies by Les Binet and Peter Field.

    Ebquity | Intel (2018). Re-evaluating Media: What the evidence reveals about the true worth of media for brand advertisers. United Kingdom: RADIOCENTRE. (PDF).

    Facebook is a lower quality medium than TV, says marketing academic – Brand Republic News

    TubeMogul Partners With Facebook to Help Brands Extend TV Audience Reach to Digital | Adweek

    Do TV Ads Drive Facebook, Twitter Engagement? (Study) | AdWeek

    Mediatel: Newsline: Starcom: TV is now twice the price… but not twice as good -“There’s still nothing better than [a 30 second ad],” Dan Plant said on a panel at Future of TV Advertising Global. “Unfortunately it costs twice as much now – and it hasn’t got twice as good at what it was doing. You pay twice as much to achieve the same thing.”

    Facebook suffers setback in quest to topple TV ad dominance | Digital – Ad Age – couldn’t get sufficiently high rates on ads that it was showing on connected TV devices.

    Facebook and Google, Two Giants in Digital Ads, Seek More – The New York Times – Facebook combining Nielsen TV data, treating its ads like TV. and Google plays catch-up with targeting by email address.

    What’s behind P&G’s cutback on targeted Facebook ads? | EJ Insight (Hong Kong Economic Journal) – To reach 5,000 targeted viewers on Facebook, the spending needed can reach the equivalent of that required to reach a million TV viewers, according to Peter Daboll, chief executive of Ace Metrix, which tests ads for effectiveness

    Thinkbox Media Mix Navigator.

  • Collapsing the funnel

    I was prompted to write about collapsing the funnel as a trope that marketers and adtech salespeople tell each other after listening to Jon Evans Uncensored CMO podcast. Jon was interviewing Josh Feldman.

    NBC Universal TV set (3D)

    Josh Feldman

    Feldman is CMO at NBCUniversal’s advertising and partnerships business. He has been a long-time NBCUniversal marketer. Prior NBCUniversal, Feldman started at Turner Broadcasting, where he took on various roles including national and regional advertising sales roles. He managed client relationships for a range of TV channels including Adult Swim, Cartoon Network, TBS, TNT and TruTV. Feldman’s sales orientation partly explains his collapsing the funnel perspective.

    NBCUniversal

    Mr Feldman is no longer just selling 30 second TV spots at NBCUniversal. NBCUniversal is a plethora of media properties:

    • Live events such as BravoCon
    • Five theme parks
    • 1 billion reach across more than 150 countries
    • 200 networks
    • 350 digital properties

    Here’s the way the podcast broke down:

    1. 00:35 – Josh’s Career Story
    2. 02:50 – How does being creative help with sales
    3. 04:17 – B2B strategies that make NBCU successful
    4. 09:41 – NBCU’s iconic programming
    5. 11:05 – The secret to building strong client relationships
    6. 14:21 – Funnel marketing and the importance of end of funnel <—–
    7. 16:34 – The popularity of Bravo
    8. 17:46 – BravoCon
    9. 21:00 – The best brand activations at BravoCon
    10. 22:51 – How brands can work with talent
    11. 24:49 – Being a media partner for the Olympics
    12. 27:59 – Josh’s advice on creativity and landing your message
    13. 31:39 – Helping smaller brands

    Two aspects to collapsing the funnel

    Josh’s comment about collapsing the funnel was emblematic of two separate trends going on that he encapsulated in this one segment of the show.

    • The first is that performance marketers are waking up to the fact that brand matters.
    • The second trend is the fusion of sales and marketing functions in the business-to-business through account-based marketing or what used to be a sales support function now being lionised as a ‘strategic approach’.

    Brand matters

    A classic example of what happens if one focuses exclusively on performance marketing is the plateauing of growth that occurred in ASOS. The ASOS story is now often cited by marketing media mix experts as an example of what happens when brand building isn’t used to support performance marketing.

    In the noughties and 2010s ASOS was a purveyor of trendy clothing for young people. It started as a copycat brand over time became a competitor to Urban Outfitters and an Etsy-type platform for small vintage clothing and design boutiques.

    ASOS review

    ASOS took a performance marketing approach to growing its business. Over time it expanded to eventually ship to 197 countries, but 40 percent of its customer base was still in the UK.

    ASOS customers and orders over time

    Performance marketing drove the customer base, but didn’t drive a significant increase in the number of orders per customer over time.

    ASOS basket size

    When we look at the inflation adjusted average basket value, we see a steady decline each year, with a sharper drop from 2021 onwards.

    Performance marketing failed to increase basket size, and each customer added was less valuable than the last. Especially when one factors in the complexity of global logistics required for customer deliveries.

    This next bit is speculative, but the geographic expansion drove growth as performance marketing based growth in its established markets plateaued.

    The business went into reverse after 2020. The reasons for this reversal are likely to be multi-variant including:

    • Performance marketing plateau.
    • The bifurcation of the market. At the bottom end, Shein, Temu and TikTok commerce. At the top end luxury brand websites and secondary market platforms like StockX.
    • Culture. Like other online properties including Buzzfeed and Vice News, ASOS had a millennial user base that has been somewhat aged out.
    • The cost of living crisis due to post-COVID inflation.

    Let’s next think about advertising, in particular Les Binet’s explanation of how advertising really works. In this explanation summarises the conclusions of decades of Ehrensberg-Bass Institute research, alongside marketing science work by the likes of the IPA into a six line explanation.

    Advertising increases / maintains sales and / or margins

    By

    Slightly increasing the chance that people will choose your brand

    By

    Making the brand easy to think of and easy-to-buy

    And

    Creating positive feelings and associations

    Via

    Broad reaching ads that people find interesting and enjoyable

    And

    Targeted activations that they find relevant and useful

    Les Binet – How advertising REALLY works | YouTube

    ASOS failed to maintain sales and margins because they focused on targeted activations – that consumers found useful. But the utility seems to have changed over time.

    This happened despite ASOS using data science to optimise their marketing with a particular focus on geo-experimentation in performance marketing rather like trialing TV ads in different TV company regions, which marketers have done for the past 70+ years.

    This isn’t because Lilia and Clara are bad data scientists, indeed I think they are good marketers using data to inform their decisions. The problem was that the focus was nearly exclusively on performance marketing.

    ASOS are an example that has started to persuade performance marketers that brand advertising helps performance too.

    ABM

    Account based marketing is a strategic approach to business sales. It depends on account intelligence and analysis. This insight is used when an organisation considers and communicates with each prospect or customer account as markets of one.

    Target selection becomes important and the criteria is usually focused on the most profitable business.

    In existing accounts it is focused on upselling or cross-selling products and services to the customer. The main focus is alignment of marketing tactics with sales management. This moves the focus from individuals as targets to groups of people within an organisation.

    ABM isn’t about collapsing the funnel per se but about melding it and reshaping it in the service of the salesforce rather than short term and long term brand with sales.

    More marketing-related content here.

    More information

    The Josh Feldman podcast episode.

    ASOS Revenue and Usage Statistics (2024)

    ASOS-related coverage on Financial Times

  • Six hundred pairs + more stuff

    Six hundred pairs of Nikes in a custom-built house

    The six hundred pairs of Nikes are owned by a Japanese lady who now is head of marketing for Ugg in Japan. Previously she’d spent over 20 years in sales and marketing for Nike. Her house was designed around her shoe collection and the double height ceiling in the room to host the six hundred pairs is worth watching for alone. There are more than six hundred pairs. Some of the stories about the six hundred pairs of shoes are fascinating such as how Nike Air Max 95s were responsible for thefts and muggings in Japan.

    Tom Ford

    Everyone needs a Tom Ford in their life. From personal life hacks to interior design and grooming all in the space of a few minutes. This sounds as if the interview as done around about the time that Ford was bowing out of his fashion and beauty businesses.

    Gibbs SR toothpaste

    Along with Close Up and Aquafresh; Gibbs SR toothpaste was one of the toothpastes I remember most from childhood. Unilever bundled it eventually into Mentadent and it was quietly taken off the UK market in 2018.

    I didn’t realise that Gibbs SR toothpaste was the first advertisement shown on British television. UK law had changed the previous year allowing for commercial television. The creative behind the ad was Brian Palmer of Young & Rubican (now VML).

    So, I was listening to the Uncensored CEO podcast Jon Evans when he had Les Binet and Sarah Carter on. One of them mentioned that the above ad was tested recently and scored top scores. It might be novelty, but is unlikely to be nostalgia that drove this test score. What’s more interesting it that Y&R managed to get the creative so high performing decades before the kind of tools that we have now.

    Hyper-reality

    Keiichi Matsuda took what Apple would call spatial computing to its logical conclusion in this 7 year old film HYPER-REALITY. There are a number of clever aspects to it. Watch when the device reboots in the supermarket and the glyph wearing criminal who escapes identification by the system.

    In reality, hardware will restrict how useable that these products will be. Which is the reason why the Apple Vision Pro looks so cumbersome. More related content here.

    John Glenn

    Great interview with Mercury and Apollo programme astronaut John Glenn covering different aspects of his experience as an astronaut. We hear how astronauts became so involved in the engineering and safety aspects of the Mercury and Apollo programmes.