With more decisions to be made about where you put your marcom dollars these days, there’s more to measure when it comes to return on marketing investment (ROMI). And given the impact of influencers and the speed at which programs can be tweaked, there’s also more need for speed to keep up on both attitudinal and actual performance metrics.

Panelists:
Kevin Banderk, chief Koodo officer, Koodo Mobile
Shelley Brown, president, Zig
Kevin Edwards, VP marketing, Grand & Toy
Ian Madell, managing director, Level5 Strategic Brand Advisors
Gord Meyer, Household Care business unit director, Procter & Gamble Canada
Martin Rydlo, director of portfolio strategy & initiatives, Campbell Company of Canada
Christine Saunders, SVP group director, Starcom MediaVest Group
Karrie Van Belle, director, Canada marketing, BlackRock Asset Management (iShares)
Annette Warring, president, Genesis Vizeum

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Moderator:
Joan McArthur, Joan McArthur Training & Consulting

Joan McArthur: Has the evolving, conversational nature of marcom changed your ROMI metrics, practices and thinking? If so, how?

Gord Meyer: We've always been a company that measures things, but recently we've taken more of a global stance. When I first started looking at marketing ROI it would have been more micro, local stuff, but now that we have big global brands, we take a more macro approach. Some localization is okay, but we use a suite of tools so now we can begin to compare; now I can talk to counterparts in Western Europe or in regions of the States, and say ‘okay, what are you trying, and what am I doing, and how can we compare notes?'
So it's a very different, much more globally collaborative activity than it used to be. Now we're looking at the literally billions of dollars that we spend on marketing investment to identify the best practices.

McArthur: So you can now measure your measuring against countries that are ostensibly in somewhat the same position.

Meyer: And we can dine off of their best practices. If we're [wondering] should we try something, perhaps someone else has tried it already, or if we're entering new space, we're part of a collaborative network; we can put our toe in the water and measure our way through it, and then we'll feed that learning into the global system. So it's a great community effort as opposed to a solitary effort.

McArthur: I read an article today that talked about P&G and Facebook. Already there's a lot of press around it, and questions.

Meyer: We're entered into that space. Somebody had to run the first TV commercial, and they don't work for us anymore, but somewhere we probably have that genetic learning; we have a tendency to want to test and try things.
In Canada, we said we're going to take our digital spend up significantly, three to 10 times, brands mandated it. We didn't know what the measurements were at the time, but we measured on the fly and now, just as I was arriving here, I got a BlackBerry message with a suite of tools for our brand managers and measurement insights on what works, what doesn't, rich vs. video vs. banner ads, how we should test your creative. We've created all of that learning in the last three years.