Speech Summaries

Glenn Engler Executive Vice President, Marketing Digitas

Marketing Track: Measuring Integrated Marketing Panel

Moderator: Charlene Li, Principal Analyst, Forrester Research

Chris Gaebler, Director, Marketing Strategy and Intelligence, Corporate Marketing, Sony Electronics

Steven G. Rosenblum, Director, GMC Advertising and Sales Promotion, Pontiac-GMC Division, General Motors Corporation

Glenn Engler, Executive Vice President, Marketing, Digitas

Chris Gaebler began with a short presentation. He spoke about the necessity of fighting institutional behavior to meet marketing goals; it is necessary to look at projects collectively and not as individual people's pet projects. Chris gave a brief overview of how Sony tracks its projects and how it uses data to change its marketing strategies. He closed by mentioning the limits of data: While data can be extremely useful in planning and strategizing, data only shows the short-term, tactical piece and doesn't capture the increased brand equity.

Steven Rosenblum gave an overview of GMC's marketing strategies (general ads, partnerships, relationship marketing, events, and interactive). He talked briefly about the metrics GMC uses to measure events, such as the number of people who test drive or sit in a GMC truck.

Glenn Engler represented Digitas, which is GMC's agency. He talked about how an automobile purchase is a high consideration purchase and how it's important to get consumers into, and then keep them in, the consideration phase, until they're ready to buy.

Questions And Answers

Q: How do you face the organizational challenge of embracing integrated marketing?

A: Chris: It really helps to have full support at the executive level. If a directive comes in from Tokyo (headquarters), it obviously gets a lot more attention and compliance.

Q: Should a company ever hire an independent company to measure its marketing influence? Or should you just let the agency measure everything?

A: Chris: It is definitely worth it to hire an independent company. Last year, Sony hired Hollings Partners to measure a campaign's effectiveness.

Steve: Yes, you should never just blindly trust your agency to measure campaign effectiveness. Agencies can be biased. At GMC, an outside company collects the data, and then the analysis is done by GMC, its agency, and the outside company.

Q: How do you measure the individual contribution of each aspect of the campaign?

A: Chris: There are statistical techniques you can use. Steven: GMC hired a consulting firm, not just an analytics firm, to measure this and also interpret it in a language that the executive level can understand and respond to.