Marketing Effectiveness News & Releases

LONDON, 30 December 2011 – The Fournaise Marketing Group, one of the global leaders in Marketing Performance Measurement & Management (MPM), tracked that overall advertising effectiveness increased by +25% in 2011 compared to 2010 for its Marketer clients – thanks to a solid performance in the second half of the year.

Fournaise used its proprietary cloud-based Marketing Performance solutions Fournaise Campaigns Performance SoftScore (F-CPSS™), Fournaise ShopperConvertor® and Fournaise CompetitionTracker™ to:

a) Performance-Track across 17 media types (traditional, online and mobile) and 20 countries worldwide millions of cross-channel conditioning-focused ads deployed by its B2C and B2B Marketer clients (and their competitors) for Large Organisations and Small & Medium Businesses; and

b) Measure the actual ability of these ads to condition their target audience and generate incremental customer demand for the products and services advertised.

Fournaise Performance-Tracked that:

1) Advertising effectiveness increased the most in mature markets (US, Europe and Australia) at +28% while developing markets like China and Southeast Asia experienced an average +22% decrease.

2) B2B ad campaigns did particularly well: their effectiveness went up by +30%, while B2C campaigns increased by +20%.

3) However, online ads continued their downward spiral and were 10% less effective in incremental customer demand generation compared to the same period last year. This decrease in performance was particularly severe for online display ads (-17% fall) and (third party database list) email campaigns (-11% fall).

4) Interestingly, ad campaigns focusing on purchase frequency increase (in B2C) and prospect nurturing (in B2B) were 3 times more effective than new buyer/prospect acquisition ones.

Despite this positive growth in effectiveness, Fournaise identified 4 performance-related challenges Marketers still needed to overcome to generate even better results in the future:

1) Many Marketers were still not focused enough on the demand-generation expectations of their top management: they continued to spend too much of their time and money on building awareness through “creativity” and new media, instead of taking the pragmatic approach of focusing on the customer benefits and competitive strengths their products/services bring to their target audience.

2) Many Marketers and their ad agencies still relied too much on gut-feelings, hearsay and questionable data to develop effective strategies and ad campaigns. Fournaise measured that of the thousands of cross-channel ads it Performance-Tracked in 2011, less than 40% were properly test-scored by Marketers at pre-launch level using solid hi-quant methodologies – leading the balance 60% to achieve disappointing performance results in terms of appeal, value propositions, message relevance and audience engagement.

3) Many media platforms under-performed in their ability to bring the campaigns to the right target audience – with online display ads and (third party database list) email campaigns performing particularly badly: Fournaise identified that 90% of the online media used by its clients were not independently audited and therefore could not prove their claims in terms of volume and profiles for their traffic and databases – making the Marketing Performance company seriously question the accuracy and authenticity of the online media data provided to its clients.

“And there is a fourth challenge: are Marketers and their ad agencies willing to listen to what the Performance-Tracking data is telling them” said Jerome Fontaine, CEO & Chief Tracker of Fournaise.

“For those who do, we tracked a clear ad effectiveness improvement, a positive business impact and a +80% increase in CEO satisfaction with Marketing” he added.

“But for those who don’t, listening to what the Performance-Tracking data is telling them means making too many changes to the way they advertise, and they are not prepared to do that (yet). Interestingly, this is the group in which we also noticed the highest marketing staff turnover and the lowest level of CEO satisfaction with Marketing” he added.

NOTES
About The Fournaise Marketing Group – The Marketing Performance Booster®

Fournaise is one of the Global Leaders in Marketing Performance Measurement & Management (MPM).

Their Technology Solutions Track & Boost the performance of any marketing strategy and any ad campaign, in any media (traditional, online and mobile), on any audience, anywhere in the world – automatically, seamlessly and real time.

They feed Marketers with the critical Marketing Performance Data they need to generate more customer demand for their products/services.

Fournaise’s solutions are used across 20 countries worldwide and 13 vertical industries by FORTUNE 500 companies, Large Corporations, SMEs and Advertising Agencies.

Fournaise’s Global Headquarters are in the UK, with operations in the US, Asia and Australia.