Five Lessons from AMA's Marketing Research Conference
Hundreds of market researchers from across the country gathered in Atlanta this week for the American Marketing Association’s Marketing Research Conference, to heed guidance from research leaders at Coca-Cola, HP, General Mills, comScore and other companies. A general lesson time and time again: researchers need to be more concerned with looking forward so they’ll better serve their companies, and the industry, as change agents.
That said, there’s nothing wrong with looking back and in doing so highlighting some insightful ideas presented at the conference. Here are five standout statistics presented at this year’s Marketing Research Conference and the lessons behind the numbers.
• 0.1% - That’s the approximate average click-through rate for display banner ads (excluding search), Gian Fulgoni, CEO of comScore, said at the conference. And 64% of the 240 agency executives surveyed by comScore said they rely on click through rates as a metric of campaign success. “Clicks don’t reflect the cumulative or latent impact of advertising. Clicks don’t tell you anything about brand-building effects,” he said. Instead, researchers should develop behavioral tracking techniques to capture effect over time as a more reliable measure of display ad effectiveness, he said.
• 68% of the approximately 350 “blue chip” managers surveyed by Maritz said they had mixed results or were struggling with integrating data from the voice of the customer research sources. D. Randall Brandt, vice president of customer experience and loyalty at Maritz, advised developing a uniform set of customer experience categories and applying them consistently to the data. Some systems may have to be simplified so you can get apples to apples, he acknowledged, but you’ll at least have some progress.
• 20 million – That’s the approximate number of tweets mentioning brands or products that are pushed out every day, according to Ken Sickles, global product director at Dow Jones and Company. Researchers should keep an eye on online chatter, particularly from industry experts and influencers who champion their respective brands. Listorious and TweetDeck can give you some guidance, Sickles said.
• 88% of the approximately 1,500 CEOs surveyed by IBM said getting close to the customers was their number one priority over the next five years, Clare Hart, president and CEO at Infogroup, said during her presentation. “This is big for people in this room,” Hart said, as it’s the information cultivated by market researchers that CEOs want to achieve their top goal. Within this context “marketing research, whether its primary or secondary, is critical to every business decision,” she added. But researchers have to propose clear actions from their insights so their CEOs will see the value of their findings.
• 12% - According to findings from an ESPN study gauging audience reaction to advertising across TV, mobile, radio, magazine and online during this summer's World Cup, viewers who watched the World Cup outside their home on TV (such as at a sports bar) had a 12% greater favorability toward advertisers compared with people who watched the World Cup at home on TV. Other findings from this study, presented at the conference by Julie Propper, director of advertising analytics for ESPN Research+Analytics division, will be detailed in an article appearing in the Oct. 7 issue of Marketing News’ e-newsletter Marketing News Exclusives.
