With the growth in digital media, marketers have a lot more real-time data to model and demonstrate results. “With the integration of a larger amount of digital [media], it’s making the story more relatable to the CFO,” Roehm said. “To the extent that digital becomes a larger part of the marketing budget, it makes your CFO conversations easier.” For example, Anderson said one Doremus effort for Thomson Reuters was able to track its audience through the day by combining traditional and digital media. The combination generated a measurable 32-to-1 ROI: “That’s going to certainly gain the attention of the CFO,” he said.
4. Show A Before And After The finance staff wants to see ROI in concrete terms, so to tell a good story, marketers need to do more modeling than they have done before. Last year, while still a marketer with IBM, Todd Powers did some research that segmented customers who had been exposed to IBM’s advertising and matched them to the corporate ledger to figure out whether those clients exposed to advertising were spending more money on its products. It found a 10% increase in advertising would increase revenues “in the multiple millions of dollars,” said Powers, now chief research officer of the Advertising Research Foundation. “The CMO for the first time was able to take compelling information about the absolute impact of our advertising, and that made for a very enjoyable conversation with the finance department,” Powers told CMO.com. “Normally the finance department is questioning everything you do as an expense. We were taking them evidence that the expense we were discussing was absolutely creating revenue.”
5. Don’t Get Too Hung Up On Numbers “The numbers tell you a story, but they may create the false illusion of cause and effect,” Hill said. An increase in sales of a product can be a result of additional marketing spend, but also of additional support from retailers and affiliates, price cuts, or merchandising that’s executed at the same time. Some decisions still have to be informed opinions, where the experience of the marketing staff has to make up for the absence of clear data, Woerhle said. This is where it helps to have a team that cuts across departments, including sales, marketing and finance, he adds. “Modeling has different degrees of sophistication. Some businesses have rich databases and history, so they can model effectively. In others, the modeling might be as simple as five people from that category--including finance and marketing--sitting around a table with a whiteboard and a bunch of data sheets,” Woerhle said. The key in these CMO-CFO conversations is to find ways to line up marketing objectives so they achieve the company’s business objectives, and those are not too hard to figure out, Anderson said. It’s about profit. “The common ground is a little bit like Jerry Maguire: ‘Show me the money,’” he said.
2011 Media Report Villanova School of Business Page 91