The Fournaise Marketing Group - The Customer Acquisition Maximiser™

60% of advertising spending was wasted in 2008

Global Customer Acquisition Maximisation company warns of low effectiveness level of advertising campaigns

LONDON, 20 January 2009 – The Fournaise Marketing Group, one of the global leaders in all-media marketing effectiveness tracking, released that 60% of all advertising spending it tracked around the world in 2008 failed to deliver the results expected by their marketers and can therefore be considered wasted.

Specialised in tracking, measuring and auditing the real-time performance of marketing and advertising campaigns deployed in both traditional and online media, Fournaise used its proprietary marketing effectiveness tracking solutions to measure the ability of the advertising campaigns to generate both direct and indirect engagement with their target audience, and therefore their ability to boost the advertisers’ Profit & Loss (“P&L”) through:
• increase in retail traffic;
• increase in sales;
• increase in leads/prospects captured; and/or
• increase in positive target audience conditioning.

Through the campaigns it tracked across offline and online media, Fournaise revealed that while the average Marketing Wastage Rate (MWR) in the business-to-consumer (B2C) industry is 65%, it falls to 47% in the business-to-business (B2B) industry.

“We noticed that the majority of B2B marketers are very focused on making their campaigns deliver hard, tangible results, i.e. leads or prospects that they can convert afterwards. On the other hand, the majority of B2C marketers tend to rely heavily on the old and traditional model of brand building: by mainly going after awareness and recall through expensive and impact-driven media buys, they hope to deliver more sales and/or in-store traffic down the line - a fundamental mistake nowadays given the high level of advertising clutter, which leads to high levels of wastage” says Jerome Fontaine, CEO & Chief Tracker of Fournaise.

“The good news is that with our solutions, marketers are able to pinpoint real time what worked and what did not, all the way down to media, insertions and even formats. From there they can put in place strategies to reduce this wastage and increase effectiveness, real time” Fontaine added.

Fournaise identified that the 3 most effective media for the campaigns it tracked in 2008 (i.e. the media with the lowest MWRs) were:
1. Text emails and eDMs (online category)
2. Direct mailers (direct marketing category)
3. Newspapers (print category)

While the 3 least effective media tracked (i.e. the media with the highest MWRs) were:
1. Sponsoring (sponsorship/endorsement category)
2. Posters/billboards (outdoor/out-of-home category)
3. Banner/display ads (online category)

To help their company successfully ride this recession storm, Fontaine believes marketers around the world must overcome 4 challenges:

1. They must first pull their head out of the sand, get out of their comfort zone and accept their reality once and for all: their job as a marketer is to grow their company’s P&L, nothing else;

2. They must change their approach by starting to be much more bottom-line-focused and embrace P&L-related key performance indicators: every single advertising spend must be tracked and must deliver tangible results;

3. They must be prepared to handle the truth, to take the necessary action to adjust their plans and to move their budgets to where the results are coming from in order to achieve the highest yields, real time – even if it means to cut or reduce the areas that they spend on out of tradition; and

4. They must start thinking like business owners and treat their budgets as if it was their own money. Would you agree to give away 60% of your own money every month without getting anything back in return?

NOTES

About The Fournaise Marketing Group – The Customer Acquisition Maximiser™
We are one of the world’s leading Customer Acquisition Maximisation companies. Result-driven Marketers call us when they want to acquire more customers to boost sales: our unique Marketing Tracking & Maximisation solutions enable them to track and maximise the real-time effectiveness of all their marketing campaigns to (1) push them to deliver better results and (2) boost their Marketing ROI. Our portfolio of clients includes MNCs from the FORTUNE 500 group of companies, leading International Advertising Agencies and Small & Medium Enterprises (SMEs). www.fournaisegroup.com

For more details, please contact:
Ms. Katherine Watts - Marketing Department
The Fournaise Marketing Group –
The Customer Acquisition Maximiser™
Email: katherine.watts@fournaisegroup.com
Telephone: +44 (0)8 700 429 688 (in the UK) or
1-800-798-8347 (US toll free)

For press enquiries, please contact:
Melinda Goh
Global PR Department
Email: melinda.goh@fournaisegroup.com
Website: www.fournaisegroup.com