The Future of Agencies and Marketers is Proof-Based

Where success will be greatest, we wager, will be where the agency strives to deliver both of these things. There will need to be third party proof about the performance part.The agency would be wise to propose including clauses in client contracts that would enable the compiling of ROI results anonymously for marketing of the agency.

Agencies of the future who will be the most successful will be ones that are so confident they work for cost plus share of incremental sales and/or share of incremental equity value.

Such confidence is only possible to the degree that the agency adopts scientific rigor. The Advertising Research Foundation (ARF), whose mission is to increase the use of science in marketing, advertising, and media, has just announced RCT21, a new initiative with 605, Central Control, and Bill Harvey Consulting, which provides peer-reviewed scientific Random Control Trial verification of the hypotheses derived from attribution.

We are looking to convert the industry to a system that follows the workflow of science. In science first you observe, then you experiment. All of the attribution methodologies are in the schematic below in the curved arrow called "Observation". The attribution suppliers are what generate the questions and hypotheses. Without observation first, science stops dead in its tracks. Marketers stop there and place our bets on the roulette wheel of reality. Science doesn't stop there; it goes on to test the hypotheses by means of experimentation. That way they can be certain of facts, and learn knowledge. That way marketers can stop gambling and be sure of outcomes before we make our multimillion dollar moves.

Adding experiments to what we do does not reduce the role of attribution, instead it:

1. Verifies or disconfirms the hypotheses.
2. Makes attribution better. Attribution companies will seek to improve their algorithms to better predict the findings of RCTs.
3. Makes the attribution companies stronger as in the end they will be the ones doing the RCTs. RCT21 is to develop the training materials for them to take over the task.

In marketing and advertising the use of experimentation has gone by the wayside. We delude ourselves to think that what we learn from the co-incidences of the past is robust enough to predict what will work this next time. MMM, MTA, TRA, NCS, Shopcom, 605 et al are all observational, and we all use inductive logic to tease out what might be findings about X causing Y, or not. We stop at that point, make a judgment call, and like a gambler, without solid proof, we bet that this will be a good investment.

Your current gut judgments are what guides the tens of millions of dollars you spend. Wouldn't you like to be able to make decisions with more certainty about what the results will be?

The most successful of us do not stop with correlation. The FAANGs, DCTs, Direct Marketers, they use Random Control Trials (RCTs); experiments. Is that why they are so much more successful and roll over the pre-existing marketing geniuses in category after category? In a word, YES!That is indeed the whole point.

The media costs are all working media costs. Putting them under the measurement of the RCT does not diminish their marketplace impact. The minuteness of the research cost for true science is now a reality. Please look at RCT21. It is not a lot of work for the marketer or agency, nor a lot of money. How often do you get to be protected by peer-reviewed research?

The practitioners of the near future will learn this lesson so well they can teach it.

The way it has been up to now:

What it shall be:

Someday soon, a very successful agency will offer Proofs of Concept (POC) to new clients, based on RCTs.

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The opinions expressed here are the author's views and do not necessarily represent the views of MediaVillage.com/MyersBizNet.