McArthur: Christine, what is changing at your end?

Christine Saunders: The challenge is that some of the tools haven't caught up with landscape that we're dealing with. With the more formal tools a lot of our clients are using, like marketing mix modelling (MMM), we're using last year's data to influence next year's plans. You're looking at two-year-old data and the landscape's completely changed.
And it's hard to get the level of data in Canada to make a real impact. Canadians don't want to answer questions, so it's really hard to get sample size. We recently did, for a smaller client, a cross-media optimization study in the U.S. and Canada; U.S. had robust numbers, all kinds of metrics across all kinds of new media, as well as robust traditional media choices. In Canada we got sample sizes back from television. Great.
And the other challenge is that often, depending on the client again, ROI decisions fall to the youngest marketers in the room, and they can be life preservers for them. No one ended their career by making the choice [based on the fact] that the ROI on this is higher than this.

McArthur: I love that Campbell's and P&G are talking about right-brain thinking in terms of measurements.

Meyer: It's a balance. What we learned is that some of the things that have always been true are true, like testing your creative and making sure that you've got good ideas that are clear. You can go crazy with all kinds of interactive stuff, but guess what, people don't always remember what they've just been interacting with, or they don't want to because they're really on a mission that isn't really to interact with your business and you've just wasted a lot of money on some tool. On the other hand there's a time to use [and] learn about these new tools, but don't forget about the rules of the old tools.
And we make sure trade is in the mix. Sometimes for brands the biggest insight is, if I could just get more display compliance when I do run my trade events, that's the biggest ROI lift I can get, and that shouldn't cost me any money, that's just better execution of what I'm already doing.
Then the other thing is retailers are starting to buy these tools, and whereas you used to have a debate with retailers about what to do, now more and more, optimistically, we're seeing the ability to say ‘okay, let's together pick the best mutual ROI tool as opposed to you trying to sell me something that seems like a good ROI for you and lousy for me and vice versa.'
So now we're using a common language to talk about what can be affecting one part of the business so that we can let all our stakeholders know we're spending all the pennies and not just the TV or classic marketing money vs. the trade money. It's one big pool now as opposed to two conflicting pools.

Kevin Banderk: We take a ‘let's try and fail and if we fail, fail fast' approach to new media, because I'd say existing metrics are great for existing solutions, but with new media you've got to try stuff out. We've experimented with a few things, some worked very well. Our most recent one was probably our biggest success; we launched a YouTube game called ‘Sugar Streak.' In less than two months we had over 1.2 million video hits and about 350,000 channel views, mostly in Canada.
But we don't look at social media as the only avenue. When we started we needed to be all about awareness so we obliterated OOH. It's an awareness media.
I would say too often the metrics make people say, ‘oh this group hates our message!' And they take that as a bad thing. Early on we made it onto a lot of the most loved and the most hated advertising lists simultaneously.A lot of companies try to appeal to everyone, they don't want (anyone) to dislike them, and you can have all the measures in the world, and you can have all the right media, and it's still not going to do anything unless the creative has made an impact.