The Pontiflex CPL Blog

At an advertising agency, everything seems to move slowly and languidly in the last days of August as the summer come to a close. I remember how phone calls got fewer in number, the fax (yes, we used it back then) was silent – even the birds on our windowsills lost interest in chirping raucously as they slipped into their droopy siestas.

And then, came September.  This inevitably resulted in a flurry of activity leading up to the holiday season, where agencies and marketing departments hoped to go to their C-level executives with good news, on how marketing was instrumental in driving business success.

Or at least, that’s the general idea.

To get to the 2008 holiday season with a bountiful of good news, here are four simple things that marketers can put in place to make sure that their hard work in the fourth quarter allows them to tangibly demonstrate the value of marketing:

1.Pay for Engagement: Click-throughs are very 1990. I would get my publishers to price online banners on a Cost-per-Engagement pricing model (like Starcom did for Kellog’s) or AdUnit X banners, which allow advertisers to run display advertising on a CPL pricing model.

2. Add transparent CPL advertising to the media mix: Bolster media with transparent CPL advertising (in addition to banner and search advertising) to add in accountability into your campaign.  This allows you to build in an element of predictability when it comes to planning budgets and forecasting returns.

3. Engage consumers: It’s no coincidence that politicians are investing so much effort in engaging consumers online. The era of announcement is over. Branding is now all about engaging consumers in a relevant manner – and at multiple touchpoints. Do you have a newsletter, community site or some member acquisition program as part of your branding plan? Well, you really should.

4. Centralize campaign management: Centralize and automate campaign setup, reporting and optimization as much as possible. We have all been through our fair share of very painful emails, phone calls and faxes. They take up a lot of time and are not good for the blood pressure. By centralizing campaign management,  you can devote your time to monitoring backend campaign metrics like newsletter click-through rates, repeat orders, sales, etc.  Which allows you to tie in your marketing dollars to more meaningful backend metrics, as opposed to meaningless ones like click-through rates, etc.

And then when its’s time for Santa, we will all have every reason to go Ho Ho Ho.