ROI Advertising

We help the leading marketers achieve exceptional return on investment.

What We Do

We help our clients optimize their marketing spend across regions and offerings, craft the right messages for their target audiences, and select the best media channels from the diverse options available today.

The marketing opportunity. Marketing spend worldwide surpasses $1 trillion, which is equivalent to 1 to 2 percent of global GDP. Marketing spend has been growing faster than the revenue for several decades. Based on our experience, 15 to 20 percent of marketing spend can be saved through better MROI practices, and then reinvested for growth or added to the bottom line. That amounts to up to $200 billion globally per year.

The challenge of marketing. Marketers today face many difficulties, such as high growth expectations, fierce competition, and the digital and social-media revolution. Adopting MROI as a discipline can help create strong brands that deliver better returns.

Our Core Beliefs

Better objectives based on the consumer decision journey (CDJ) lead to better ROI. Better marketing objectives, in turn, influence better metrics.
Brand messaging is a key factor for ROI success. It is more important to have clarity on the most effective messaging attributes for the specific brand objective than to have a finely tuned marketing mix.
Marketing-mix analytics that are not meaningful to the final business user are worthless. Marketing-mix models should be based on industry knowledge, built with clear assumptions, and presented in a way that is intuitive to the business user.
Marketing-investment decisions should consider both short- and long-term impact. Marketing mix models, for example, can only measure short-term impact and need to be supplemented with long-term (brand-building) impact estimates.
Future potential is a vital input. Spend should be skewed toward future growth, and not just based on past performance.
Ultimately, achieving marketing spend effectiveness depends on capabilities, processes, and talent. Invest in your organization (not just your data) to create and maintain excellence in ROI.

The 5-step approach

Spending priorities: Track how all consumer-facing dollars are allocated at an enterprise-wide level. Cover all working and nonworking spend across all regions, brands, marketing vehicles, etc. Make sure that enterprise-wide spend distribution is consistent with the company’s strategic goals and with the sources of future growth.
Message definition: Comprehend CDJ deeply, and identify the key “battlegrounds” for your brand. Define the messaging and determine the marketing vehicles that will be most efficient at moving consumers through the chosen stage in the CDJ. (See “Winning the consumer decision journey,” McKinsey Quarterly).
Marketing mix: Choose an approach based on business requirements, data availability, and analytical preferences and stick to it. Consider three approaches—benchmarks, advanced econometrics, and consumer surveys—which can be applied separately or together. Don’t overlook business judgment.
Spend efficiency: Improve marketing spend through lean methods and purchasing controls. Discover opportunities to lower nonworking spend (for example, agency consolidation, research-vendor evaluation) and enhance buying efficiencies on working media (such as best-practice procurement and optimized time-length).
Sustainability: Achieve sustainable impact through all the classic organization levers. Establish best-practice capabilities, supported by ROI tools and processes, key performance indicators, and by senior-level behaviors. Make marketing an investment, not a cost center.