Double Honors for ZenithOptimedia at The 2009 Hall of Fame Awards

It was truly a memorable night for all staff at ZenithOptimedia Singapore as we celebrated the success of our two brilliant minds. Well done to Jacqui and Amy!



Amy Tan - Young Professional of the Year




Jacqui Lim - Media Planner of the Year

ZenithOptimedia’s latest innovation case study is our work for AEG Electrolux’s “The World is Noisy” campaign. The white goods category is a harder category to drum up excitement. ZenithOptimedia’s consumer research showed that noise is not such a crucial buying criterion until the moment people are reminded of the nuisance of noise in city living. In response to this insight, the role of communications is to amplify the issue of noise and to make it a subject of every day city conversations; in the taxi, by the water cooler or at the dinner party.

Creative Execution
Armed with handheld decibel meters, the Zenith’s team discovered the noisiest locations across Europe. We embedded decibel meters into large posters and digital screens displayed the constant noise levels in real time.

To fuel the noise argument, we live-streamed the noise data to our noise-awareness website where consumers could compare the different noise levels across the cities.
To get the major media to take notice of the story during the European Union’s Noise Awareness Day, we approached influential blogs with high quality videos and photos of the noise posters and interesting incidents caused by the interactive posters (i.e. London poster urged club owner and school kids to join forces against noise in Old St, London.).

To target major retailers at Eurocucina, Europe’s biggest appliance fair, we placed a decibel poster en route from their hotels to the fair, while also providing maps and info packages at their rooms.

Results & Effectiveness

Major blogs picked up the story and delivered 10 million posting views for free
Major print titles covered the story while in Spain the story made it to prime time
45% of those who come into contact with the campaign were more likely to think about noise when they next buying an appliance whilst 35% would consider AEG (Pan European monthly brand tracking)
The only media cost to AEG was that of buying 5 posters across Europe locations for a month

This campaign won Gold Lion Award for Best Use of Outdoor in Cannes 2009.

Effective marketing accountability requires a mix of art and science

Proof of cause and effect has become a complex issue that requires many parts of the marketing jigsaw to be linked together, says Frank Harrison, strategic resources director at ZenithOptimedia Worldwide.

In the past ten years, most acutely after the dotcom bubble burst and in the current global recession, marketers and their agents have been working harder than ever to identify the best way to measure and plan marketing returns.

We are learning that accountability is as much about the art of corporate culture as it is about the science of cause and effect. But what are the most effective approaches to marketing accountability?

“The time has come when advertising has in some hands reached the status of a science. It is based on fixed principles and is reasonably exact. The causes and effects have been analysed until they are well understood. The correct methods of procedure have been proved and established. We know what is most effective, and we act on basic law.” These words were written in 1923, in the book Scientific Advertising, by Claude Hopkins, a founder of the ad agency that became Foote Cone & Belding.

In 1923, most advertising was in print and involved a direct response mechanism. Remarkably, most of Hopkins’s guidelines are still being practised today. For anyone involved in digital marketing, this 86-year-old book is a worthwhile and salutary read. While technology may change over time, the human response to marketing remains largely the same.

Challenges of the digital age
Today, however, we live in a very different marketing environment. Proof of advertising
cause and effect is a much more vexed issue. In just a few years, the volume of influences on consumer purchase decisions has grown hugely, both those within and outside the control of brand managers. There have been big changes in consumer attention and responsiveness to marketing activities. Consumer decision-making has become more complex, as has the business and marketing environment. It is harder today to understand
cause and effect, and for marketers to build and act on knowledge of what works and what doesn’t.

In its Marketing Accountability Study, published last year, the US Association of
National Advertisers (ANA) stated: “In US companies, both large and small, the goal
of achieving true, demonstrable accountability for the marketing function, if it is considered at all, is one that has proven elusive for years. Yet more and more, senior
management and finance are demanding that marketing provide them with something more than a budget request that is justified by historical performance and ‘soft measures’ with no linkage to financial results.”
However, the ANA reported that only 14% of senior marketers felt confident in forecasts of how marketing activities would affect sales. Paradoxically, in the digital age, marketers are struggling to predict cause and effect.

Creating an accountability culture
The key learning from most surveys among senior marketers is that effective marketing ROI programmes require many parts of a ‘jigsaw’ to be linked harmoniously. Effective ROI jigsaws comprise sections on company structure and processes that are seamlessly linked to those in the areas of data and analytics. The human side of this jigsaw, which
ensures that marketers are ready, willing, and able to measure and effectively plan
return on their marketing investments, has become more crucial.

Survey after survey among marketers show that the greatest barriers to the development of effective marketing ROI programmes are to do with corporate culture, structure and processes. Studies have also found that there are three key components to fostering a successful culture of marketing accountability:
• Chief executive sponsorship. Marketing accountability within any company needs a C-level sponsor – a leader who drives the ROI focus down through the organisation – and the best person to do this is the chief executive. Top-down sponsorship ensures marketing accountability becomes a focus at all levels, not an isolated (and too often unwanted) silo.
• Cross-function collaboration. Marketing accountability depends on close collaboration across stakeholders in areas such as finance, sales, production, research, IT and marketing. Success often hinges on collaborative teams that determine the best measurement of marketing ROI, and together examine and agree the cause and effect of marketing activities.
• Marketing process with accountability at its core. The ANA’s 2005 survey into marketing accountability reported that “the modern marketer is beginningto see marketing as a ‘process’ with measurable inputs and outputs producing reliable, repeatable results. The process approach, which revolutionised the supply side, has finally come to the demand side”. Increasingly, companies are implementing marketing processes that base KPIs and decisions on effective measurement of marketing ROI.

With the right culture of accountability, companies are generally well prepared to adopt best practices in data and analytics. There are essentially three types of measure used to report marketing performance:

● Outputs, such as impressions, GRPs, reach and frequency. These report the size and nature of the audience exposed to marketing activities. They are normally measured via sampled consumer research.
● Intermediates, such as brand awareness, consideration, purchase intent and brand image. These report consumer memories, attitudes and perceptions.
They are normally measured via consumer sample tracking surveys.
● Outcomes, such as sales, test drives, brochure downloads and product enquiries. These report consumer behaviour. They are normally captured at point-of-sale.

The challenge with each of these measures is to tie individual marketing activities to the measured result: to prove cause and effect, either in totality or as a contribution to the effect – and to show how output and intermediate measures contribute to outcome measures in the short and longer term. Successful marketing ROI programmes use these insights on a cyclical basis that plans more effective marketing activities each time around.

Direct response advertisers benefit from apparently straightforward links between marketing inputs, measured outputs and outcomes – and digital media are particularly well placed to provide input-to-outcome metrics. However, the practice of crediting online outcomes to the last ad clicked highlights an issue of cause and effect. Online sales of products are not solely influenced by the most recent click on a banner or search ad. Consumer decisions will be influenced by the product, friends and family recommendations, offline marketing activities and the nature of the website selling the
product – as well as prior exposure to the brand online. The challenge is to isolate the contribution of online marketing activity, and to use the uniquely rapid and low cost testing capability of the internet to create an effective test-refine-improve cycle that delivers improvement in marketing ROI.

Marketing activity that does not include a direct response mechanism, such as that designed to improve intermediate measures, faces a greater challenge when calculating contribution to those measureas and to sales. For example, brand awareness may be influenced by prior use of the brand, seeing the brand in stores, hearing about it from friends or reading about it in print articles or online. Isolating the contribution of marketing from other influencing factors may require either a carefully controlled test, where advertising is the only difference between test and control environments, or mathematical modelling, such as econometrics.

The issue of causality
Proving and predicting the sales effect of marketing requires evidence of cause and effect: proof that the marketing inputs really caused business outcomes, either totally or in part. Yet, despite huge growth in computing and analytical resources, this remains one of the greatest challenges because there are a large number of influences on sales, and many are often more influential than marketing (Figure 1).




For example, during a hot summer, sales of ice cream grow rapidly. At the same time, ice cream advertising increases swiftly. Higher advertising correlates with higher sales. Does this mean that the advertising causes the higher sales of ice cream, or is it the warm weather, or is it a bit of both and, if so, how much of the sales are caused by the advertising? Correlation is not a good basis for saying adspend causes sales gain, unless other possible influences have been accounted for.

One way to examine this might be to look at which brands advertise and which don’t, see if those that advertised achieved higher sales growth than those that did not, and if so, judge that some of the increased sales are down to the advertising.

But this may also be incorrect as there is much else to account for, including brand size. Large brands have more consumers than small brands. They also have greater distribution and larger revenues, and they tend to spend more on advertising. Larger brands – the ones with higher ad budgets – may achieve greater sales gains than small brands. But is this because they have wider distribution, or because they have more customers, or
because of the advertising, or is it down to a mix of these factors? If so, what part does
advertising play? At a simple level, does advertising cause sales response or do higher sales cause greater advertising response? The answer is probably a bit of both. Separating the effects is essential to calculating marketing ROI. This is where econometrics can help.

Econometrics is an immensely valuable tool for calculating the likely contribution of marketing to sales. It works well for advertisers where the necessary time series data exists in the right format for the factors that are likely to have an influence on sales. Marketer surveys have found that most companies with effective marketing ROI programmes include modelling within their set of tools.

But econometrics is not a panacea. It is one piece of the marketing ROI jigsaw. It requires the right type and spectrum of data and budgets to be available for modelling
projects. It can also be weakened when the following is true for a brand:
● When the past is not a fairly good reflection of the future. Econometrics explains the past very well but this may not help in categories experiencing significant change.
● When past brand activity is not a good guide to the best the brand can do. Econometrics cannot assess marketing activities the brand has not carried out in the past.
● Lack of variation in past brand activity can stymie ability to isolate individual effects. If a brand has repeated activity year after year, econometrics can say little about how to improve on that activity.

Ad campaigns, particularly those on TV, are regularly assessed using consumer research that tracks changes in one or more of the following measures: brand recall, ad recall, brand consideration, purchase intent, brand image, brand usage, brand loyalty and (increasingly) brand recommendation. There are normally two issues with using tracking of this kind to measure advertising performance:

● Assumption of causality. There is often an incorrect assumption that the advertising was the cause of change in the tracked measures, when in reality there may be other influencers that have not been measured or accounted for.
● Assumption of ROI. There is often a failure to link intermediary measures to
outcome measures, such as sales. While growing brand awareness may be an
objective for a newly launched brand, the awareness objective is intermediary to the
ultimate objective, which is to grow sales. It is therefore important to demonstrate
that raising awareness via advertising causes sales growth.

Effective use of intermediary measures requires good understanding of the contribution
of advertising to the measures, and the knock-on effect of the measures to other intermediary measures and to business outcomes, both in the short andlonger term. Econometrics is a particularly useful tool to develop better understanding of causal effects between advertising and intermediate measures. It can identify causal effects between intermediate measures, such as between awareness and consideration or between consideration and purchase intent. It can also be used to show causal effects of intermediate measures and sales. Econometrics can help marketers to identify the chain of causality between advertising and sales.

It generally helps to continuously track a number of intermediary measures and to separate them for different consumer groups. For some brands, such as cars, it may be useful to separate measures depending on where consumers are in the purchase decision process.

Comprehensive, continuous tracking data, combined with output and outcome measures, may make it possible to implement ‘live’ econometric modelling, which continuously reports marketing ROI as new data becomes available and guides the forward use of marketing levers.

The marketing ROI jigsaw is different for every firm. Its shape and parts depend on company size, category, culture, structure, process and much else. But for all companies, effective marketing accountability requires a mix of art and science: it requires transformation of culture, of process and of the methods used to measure marketing effects, and to act on the insights from those measures. It requires a top-down focus, collaboration across multiple departments and a marketing process that has accountability at its core.

Marketers cannot rely on output or intermediary measures as proof of marketing ROI. They need detailed knowledge of outcome drivers and of marketing’s contribution to those outcomes.

Where possible, marketing objectives and goals need to be measurable, be measured, and be based on insights from measures. Marketers need to assess and establish causality, and avoid assumptions based solely on simple correlations.

Finally, once embarked on a marketing ROI path, marketers should expect gradual, rather than dramatic improvement in their knowledge and ability to act on that knowledge. Marketing ROI programmes are often discontinued because of expectations for results set within too short a timescale. Steady, stepwise improvement is the most successful approach to the art and science of marketing ROI.

Newsline - Digital
When will we tip?

Over the last few weeks we have seen a groundswell of debate regarding why in this region, at many levels digital is still having such a rough time of it. With this month's launch of the IAB in Singapore (of which Zenith is an eager founder member), and with the occurrence of the second Singapore adTech, we have seen the spotlight being shone on the Singaporean digital market's failure to gain the foothold in the industry it deserves.

Globally, depending on who you listen to, 'digital' currently accounts for approximately 12% of the total advertising pie. In the US that figure is 17%, and in the UK the figure has reached the heady heights of 20%, eclipsing spend in newspapers as long as two years ago. So, why in Singapore, a developed, mature consumer internet market is that figure currently closer to 4%, and more importantly, what will be the catalyst that drives the change?

Where the 'blame' lies is unclear. Some commentators see the agencies as the culprits (http://www.marketing-interactive.com/news/13335), whilst others point the finger at safe, risk averse marketers within client organisations - the reality is probably somewhere in between, with agencies unable to offer adequate, up front ROI assurances, and clients lacking the willingness to experiment and test new opportunities that is often required to deliver great campaigns. A naturally risk averse Singaporean culture certainly doesn't help, and this risk aversion is only heightened by the financial circumstances of the last 12 months.

However, with the average Singaporean already spending 20% of their media time online, it is still difficult to fathom why even the most risk averse of marketers are still slow to see that being where their consumers are is an absolute necessity.

When, why and how quickly we will see a seismic shift from 4% to 20% is equally difficult to predict, but below are 5 predictions of elements that I believe will be amongst the spurs to move the figure of 4% towards 20%.


1) One major catalyst to change will be when the risk flips. The old cliché in the US was that 'no brand manager ever got fired for doing a 30 second spot’, and that was the case........ until about five years ago. Suddenly marketers started to be judged on how well they were using digital channels, and the less adept marketing managers did suddenly start getting fired for just doing 30 second spots. The risk had flipped, and they could no longer afford to risk not experimenting and innovating.
In the US and Europe, the cannier clients spotted early, before the risk flipped that 'digital' was a quick and sure fire way to become famous within their organisation. Many a marketer's career received a welcome boost by becoming known as the 'digital guy' - the person in the organisation who had latched on to digital, making it their pet project and being seen as the innovator, the change agent.
We are starting to see the first signs of this happening in this market. Clients are starting to be tasked on increasing their focus on digital and are now striving to hit digital based KPIs, and once something appears in KPIs, they generally gather in pace. It seems that in Singapore as has happened in other markets, the risk is starting to flip.
There are also those clients in Singapore who are now embracing digital and seeing it as their way of becoming famous, of progressing their careers.

2) The second major catalyst I see is somewhat further in the future, and when we get there, we truly will be a long way from spending 2% of our budgets online. That point is when nobody sees digital as digital anymore. When usage of digital tools becomes absolutely ubiquitous and advertisers and users alike don't even consider the internet and mobile to be any different to TV, radio or newspapers, just different channels. Once we get to this point we will be in a position where digital communication will be seen as equal.

The term 'post digital age' has bubbled up recently, and at first listen, it’s confusing - are we suddenly going to reject our new tech toys that we have come to rely on? But what the term actually refers to is a time when we don't see things like the internet and TV on our mobiles as technology anymore, but just regular things that we use every day.

Clay Shirky puts this point far more eloquently in his recent TED talk (http://www.ted.com/talks/clay_shirky_how_cellphones_twitter_facebook_can_make_history.html ). To him, innovation will really start to happen when people start taking the shiny new toys for granted


On a similar note, it's interesting to see kids’ reactions when you talk to them about 'technology'. One recent study by MSN looking into how kids use technology encountered nothing but blank looks when researchers asked them about how they used technology. As far as they were concerened video games, Instant Messenger and the internet wasn’t technology, it was just “stuff”.

As Douglas Adams put it, "Anything that is in the world when you're born is normal and ordinary and is just a natural part of the way the world works. Anything that's invented between when you're fifteen and thirty-five is new and exciting and revolutionary and you can probably get a career in it. Anything invented after you're thirty-five is against the natural order of things."

As we all get more and more used to these new ‘technologies’ we will naturally become more comfortable with them and identify how as marketers we can utilise them.


3) But possibly the most important step for us (especially digital people in the industry) to start making significant inroads into digital getting it's deserved share of the pie lies in the langauge we use to get to that point. Much of the discussion so far has been in terms of how to divert budget to digital from other less effective media in terms of consumer engagement or measurement. The language has tended to be relatively aggressive and to an extent has created a them and us situation where the discussion has come from the angle of how much of other media's current share digital should rightly get. Whilst an increase in digital spend will inevitably come at the expense of other traditional media, the drawing up of battle grounds by the digital industry against other media does us a disservice. Yes, it is a more accountable, and when done well more engaging, but this adversarial pitting of one media against the other does nothing to help the cause. Once those involved in digital start talking about what digital can add to existing campaigns, and once we start focusing on how campaigns which utilise more than one media are stronger and more effective, we will see progress. At the moment, it's a very rare brief that can be answered by using digital in isolation, but it does have a role in most campaigns. It's a subtle difference, but I suspect that when we start talking about how digital can strengthen campaigns and add to other media, enabling them to work much harder, rather than plotting to see whether we are going to take TV's money or print's money, we may see that traditional clients relax a little and we may see quicker progress.

4. One area where agencies and media owners can certainly take a fair share of the blame is in creativity. At the moment, the majority of briefs are responded to with a very media focused (for that read banner focused) approach. The reason for this is clear. It's the easy answer, and the answer that fits the way media agencies have traditionally made their money. For a media agency working on commission, a move to creativity, a move to a good strong idea usually means funds being diverted away from a media buy, and as a result, money moving away from the agency. To tackle this, we need help from our clients to recognise two things. The first, that the old media remuneration model of commission based payments doesn't necessarily work for digital and often offers disincentives to doing good work. Where is the incentive for example in a media agency recommending ideas in an area without media costs (social networks, virtual worlds etc.)? Thankfully, most clients already understand this and have been open to different payment models that appreciate that digital is different, and hopefully these changes should see a massive impact of levels of creativity coming from agencies.
The second area where we need help from clients is in the understanding that ideas can come from anywhere. Creative agencies do not have a monopoly on creative ideas, and as the boundaries between media and creative blur, especially in digital, it's important that clients allow (and insist on) a closer (and more equal) relationship between their media and creative agencies.

When these two things happen, the potential of idea centric responses to briefs rather than cookie cutter answers will increase massively, and as this happens the real potential for driving real engagement online will also increase massively. When this happens, budget holders will be falling over themselves to experiment and try new things in digital.



5. Finally, one thing that will also impact heavily on marketers willingness to invest in digital as a media will be a shift away from campaign based marketing. This will be a paradigm shift that will take some time happen. The existing fundamental thought around advertising is that it happens in nicely packaged boxes, known as campaigns that have a clear start date and a clear end date. It's an easy, clean concept to understand. However, in an on demand, always on world where consumers expect everything to be searchable, the concept of a time boxed campaign becomes less relevant.
Brands will increasingly have less choice about when they communicate with their consumers. It won't be enough for brands to decide which periods suit them to communicate with their consumers, and an always on presence will be a necessity. That presence won't necessarily always have to be a huge campaignable idea, but a brand will always need to have something that their customers can look for, find, play with and spend time with, and the obvious place for that to exist is online.
This is a paradigm shift and one that will not happen quickly, but when marketers move away from a campaign based way of thinking and come round to an always on model of marketing, with multiple modular activities that can de dialed up or switched off in real time depending on their real time results, digital will surely flourish and we will see the 4% and probably the 20% figure shattered.

I've picked 5 catalysts that I believe could be the major sparks to breathe life into the digital industry in this region, but I could have picked many more. I haven't touched on the increasing role of procurement departments and their desire to see a proven ROI - a proven ROI that digital can demonstrate. I haven't examined the role that a developing understanding of marketers in the region that digital is not just restricted to a conversion driving media, but can also be used to unlock emotional involvement with a brand, and I haven't considered the role that digital can play in acquiring immediate campaign and even product feedback, but all of these are elements that could play a major role in convincing marketers in our region that digital needs a bigger share.

It will happen, and when it happens it will happen quickly - much more quickly than any of us can reasonably expect now. That has been the experience around the world, and will be no different here. I'm confident that the figure of 19% that PWC predicts by 2013, (http://www.marketing-interactive.com/news/13477) will happen far quicker. 2011?

Maximising Marketing ROI in a Downturn

These are tough economic times, but not all is doom and gloom. There are opportunities we can explot. ZO's team of communications experts recently put together an interesting analysis of how this downturn can be managed effectively. This was presented at an exclusive seminar by our very own Regional Communications Planning Director, Guy Abrahams.

Double Honours At The Singapore Media Awards

ZenithOptimedia clinched the top prizes in the recent Singapore Media Awards by winning the Grand Prix and Best Value Media campaign awards.

Top Recognition By Clients And Industry

ZenithOptimedia is one of the top 3 Media agency in Singapore as voted by clients and industry peers in the recent Marketing Magazine poll.

Work Hard, Play Hard

Some pictures of ZenithOptimedia folks at company social events.