Author: James Parrish, F1-Confidential.com

 

Our last post, West to East: Sports Sponsorship Lessons, talked about the relationship between sponsorship and branding – ‘Sponsorship doesn’t = Branding’. This picked up on the common misconception that to be a successful sponsor you are required to have lots of branding, everywhere.

As I was reading some case study results this week, a similar formula came to mind;

Views don’t = ROI.

Not in my book anyway! As far as we’re concerned, views (or ‘likes’ in the case of Facebook) should never be the end goal of any advertising or sponsorship campaign.

In advertising the following scenario is commonplace;

XYZ company post a video on YouTube.

The video is very clever, features a couple of celebrities and is well executed.

The video asks viewers to do something – for the sake of this example we’ll say sign up to the company’s newsletter.

The video sees over 1 million views in the first week.

Both the ad agency and XYZ company are very pleased with the results. It’s declared a success!

But this is topline campaign tracking – the bare minimum! To draw a comparison I would compare measurement of views to the measurement of brand AEV on television. It’s a measure of eyeballs!

Marketing seeks to promote and persuade – build preference if you like – in order to increase sales volume. But views mean nothing if action isn’t taken by the viewer. A minset change is needed – from eyeballs to propensity to purchase… and from ‘views’ to dollars, pounds or euros.

To borrow a saying from Jeff Bladt and Bob Filbin; Know the difference between your data (views) and your metrics (propensity to purchase or sales achieved)!