July 2009 – Rick Petry

Finding a Solution to Eroding Attribution

For decades, practitioners of DRTV have used direct marketing’s pure accountability metrics as a counterpoint to general television advertising, which has relied on the A.C. Nielsen system of rating points to derive reach, frequency and cost-per-thousand measures. DR offered the advantage of being able to measure exactly how many inquiries and sales came from each media source through the use of dedicated toll-free numbers. This gave marketers a huge advantage as they continuously optimized stations and networks. But the purity of this measurement has been fouled by the Internet–arguably the greatest vehicle for direct sales ever, yet one that threatens the foundation upon which many direct marketing houses were built: attribution. With advertisers now reporting 30 to 70 percent of their overall orders coming in over the web, and with seemingly no ability to attribute how those consumers got to a purchase decision, the direct marketing industry must unify to face this crisis.

While there has been talk of using dedicated URLs, codes, surveys and incentives to nail down Internet-based attribution, nothing rises above the anecdotal. There needs to be a concerted effort and real commitment, perhaps best driven by an industry task force, to test, authenticate and report back to the industry on the veracity of these tactics. Further, direct marketers as a whole have been slow to adopt and overlay Nielsen metrics–they’re a nuisance after all–but this attitude needs to change fast. In a world of muddled attribution, this is the gold standard–albeit in the absence of anything better–that traditional advertisers will continue to turn to if DR cannot offer them a better solution.

Instead of trying to bend consumers to its will, the industry might consider aligning what it offers in the form of marketing communications to dovetail with the consumer behavior.

Understanding just what that behavior is couldn’t be more critical; in that knowledge lies the ability to organize information about products in a manner that shifts advertising from an interruptive model to a sought-after, participatory one. In other words, give the people what they want and succeed by taking the path of least resistance. Yet to gain this insight, the industry needs to fund deep qualitative and quantitative research during an economy where the appetite for such an investment is meager.

If the leaders of this industry band together to figure out a new paradigm for direct-to-consumer advertising, the reward may be the entire universe of marketing and advertising itself. In the past, the image-addicted cognoscenti of Madison Avenue, regulators and satirists have all tried to laugh direct marketers out of town. Instead, scrappy, streetwise DR pitchmen and women have laughed all the way to the bank. Yet to prevent the balance sheets from careening sideways, a major deposit of time, effort and money should be the order of the day. Direct marketers specialize in dramatic transformations. It’s high time they architect their own.

Don’t miss Rick Petry speak on “Persuasion Science: Learning the Secrets That Sell” at 10:00 a.m. on Sunday, September 13, during ERA’s D2C Convention in Las Vegas.

Rick Petry is a freelance writer who specializes in direct marketing and is a past chairman of ERA. He can be reached at (503) 740-9065 or online at rickpetry.com.