A Pean To Incremental Profit

Adliterate’s Richard Huntington sees a difference between accountability and effectiveness. I’m not sure I do, but let’s go with his vision for a moment:

…the standard measure for return on investment would appear to be the difference between the cost of the campaign and the cost of reaching the same number of people in more conventional media. That is not a return on investment, that is the sort of haphazard disregard for accurate accounting that precipitated the current global financial crisis.
Indeed, any effectiveness metric that does not tell you the incremental profit that your marketing activity generated for the business isn’t worth the paper it is written on. Not click through, not cost per impression, not cost per response, not page views, not dwell time, not fanciful measures of engagement. Incremental profit. And if that seems an extraordinarily difficult thing for most digital campaigns to demonstrate, I’m heartily sorry. But it doesn’t make it any less imperative the industry resolves this question, because it isn’t going away.

What is clear is Huntington doesn’t want to dwell in metrics. Here’s why:

…what Chief Executive is really the least bit interested in how responsibly any one has used their money? What they tend to be concerned with is whether their marketing is having an un-ambiguously positive effect on the growth and profitability of the business.

I’d say CEOs are interested in all of the above–how partners provide value, what it costs and what their firm is going to gain from the relationship.