My brief is to describe each session, but I suspect you are time-poor and easily distracted (a normal human being, in other words) so first the overview. ‘Snakes and ladders’ was the recurring metaphor of the conference, and overall it felt like two days of ladders. Things are looking up.

 

Overview

 

There used to be some violent disagreements and heated punch ups at MAP (Ehrenburg vs Jones rumbled on for longer than Ali vs Foreman). This year, there was a refreshing amount of consensus. If that sounds cosy, it certainly wasn’t.

 

The consensus was that most of the time the majority of advertisers are measuring the wrong things. The industry needs a change in metrics, as Les Binet (my man of the match) put it:

• from rational to emotional;
• from sales to profit;
• from attitudes to behaviour.

He also argued we need better measures in all these areas, particularly to pick up the effects of newer channels.

 

Speakers from a wide variety of perspectives orbited around these same themes, and there was a healthy discussion on the final afternoon of what’s stopping us from achieving this. So it was an event full of interesting, practically placed ladders but with an awareness of the snakes out there.

 

Oh, and the carrot cake was sensational.

 

DAY ONE

 

Rod White welcomed us to the Year of the Rat and Ash Wednesday, and urged us to repent of our inappropriate measurements and quick decisions and make a fresh start in the new Chinese year

 

Pay attention. Or don’t

 

Robert Heath had evidence that advertising doesn’t create so many great brands nowadays. His analysis was that the auditors are in charge.

 

He argued that we feel things before we think them. We’ll opt for chocolate cake first, then think about it and go for fruit cake. Feelings then interact with semi-consciousness, and possibly then struggle with conscious thinking.

 

Emotionally based ads can survive being briefly scanned whereas ads that require lots of conscious attention can’t.

 

Our emotions are more easily influenced when we are not aware that the influence is happening (“I am now going to chat you up” isn’t a great line). Some researchers say emotion functions as a mechanism to attract attention.

 

Actually, the more emotion and creativity, the lower the attention and the higher the effectiveness is. Robert showed charts plotting a negative relation between them for most ads. This always seems to me to be the tricky part of his analysis for practitioners.

 

However, the fact that the handful of exceptional ads, the Cadbury’s Gorilla etc., measure well on both emotion and conscious attention means people will always aim for both and not accept that they are likely to work at a low attention level.

 

Milk the market

 

Jon Steel posed this excellent question: Is it better to get the campaign right or be able to prove it? Accountability does not necessarily mean effectiveness. Police clear-up figures, for example, are up because they target easy crimes to improve their metrics.

 

Most milk advertising was great for attitudinal measures: people agreed that milk was good for them and they should drink more, but sales continue to decline. Jon’s agency took the objective of making milk important in people’s lives.

 

I loved Jon’s comment that ‘Your research programmes must create a narrative arc that is persuasive’. O.J. Simpson’s defence team chose the objective of making it difficult for jurors to convict him, using the mantra ‘If the glove don’t fit, you must acquit.’

 

Wendy Gordon told us that we don’t really understand how people make decisions at all. Marketers get stuck with the same old metrics in the same way that frogs get boiled or a man looks for his keys under the street lamp just because that’s where the light is.

 

Fear of loss is far more powerful than taking a risk

 

Ads that give something free to people usually get their reward back very strongly by reciprocity. Top negotiators spend 400% more time identifying common points with their ‘rivals’ before commencing negotiations. Herd behaviour shows us that phrasing things in terms of ‘everybody is doing it’ is very powerful.

 

Double professor Bobby Calder talked about engagement metrics and advertising effectiveness, and also stated that marketing is undergoing a sea change.

 

Engagement, he argued, is hard to measure. It is both personal (hedonic) and social, especially online, where it takes the form of being part of a community. People who are more engaged with a magazine/website give higher scores to the ads in it. If you feel the medium is giving you more utility then you find the ad more useful, too.

 

It is important, therefore, to measure ads independently, and then in context of the magazines they might appear in; and if the ad itself picks up on themes that are covered in the mag, they will be significantly more effective

 

It was nice to have thorough confirmation of what media planners and owners assert.

 

Know your audience

 

In the discussion session, it was pointed out that mostly people know what your key brand benefit is. You don’t need to repeat it, just make them feel better about it.

 

There was an interesting discussion of how engagement should not make itself obvious. Advertisers trying hard to create ads for appropriate content can be too obvious and create a backlash.

 

It was interesting to hear that researching the same ads in the context of them appearing within the Superbowl and outside it showed that ads were received better outside the Superbowl. The Superbowl audience is now jaded, and expects wondrous entertainment form the ad break.

 

A BBH planner asked if we should ban all tracking given that it doesn’t seem to reflect the reality of how ads worked. Robert replied that most tracking just measures the message not the engagement/creativity go out and start doing it, measuring creativity not just recall and awareness of the message. Bobby Calder said the biggest change for the better would be less defensiveness and dogma on the part of research companies

 

Focus on the right metrics

 

Les Binet presented his and Peter Field’s analysis of the IPA dataBANK, the biggest library of effectiveness case studies in the world, and concluded that a lot of marketing is focusing on the wrong KPIs.

 

If your KPIs are wrong then people will focus on measures that aren’t necessarily effective, but destroy shareholder value. Accountability and effectiveness are only aligned if you have the right KPIs. Amazingly he showed us that most advertisers have the wrong ones.

 

Market share targets are better than sales targets (affected by external measures such as the weather):  

• Sales growth < etc < price premium

If you can increase your price, all the extra money goes straight to the bottom line, whereas increasing revenue also increases costs (yet most companies effectively lower price through promotions). Price is also a firmer measure of loyalty.

 

Marketers prioritise loyalty over penetration yet the latter is much more effective. Growth comes from setting media SOV ahead of market share.

 

The worst predictor of success was standout, while awareness is also a very weak correlation. The best predictor, by contrast, was likeability.

 

Most pretests aim at standout, but this is the wrong metric. Les described them as ‘a fallible predictor of a weak measure,’ and there is therefore a negative correlation between pretesting and business success.

 

Emotional campaigns work better than rational ones, yet people tend to do the opposite. Direct response is very seductive, as it offers plenty of metrics. Fame and emotional engagement, however, are more effective, and the more metrics that move, the greater the business success.

 

Les’s assertion that Cadbury’s Gorilla bombed in pre-testing is a terrific update of the old chestnut that research would have killed the Heineken campaign.

 

TROI and Monte Carlo

 

Karl Weaver took us through Monte Carlo simulations, as used by the physicists on the Manhattan project, running thousands of scenarios based on random inputs. You see that some budgets are more likely to maximize profits than others. It gives you a definable framework for budget allocation as long as you are very sure about your inputs into the model.

 

Fiona Blades new SMS-based research approach TROI was the highlight of last year’s MAP, and this year she and Ana Medeiros showed more applications for this innovative technique. They demonstrated how ‘real time’ research on Lynx was very useful to understand the need for quickly refreshing new executions. (But, for once, the tracking is almost too fast to be useful in media planning.)  

 

TROI gave them other insights that conventional measures would have missed. They discovered that Italian boys have less Axe purchasing opportunities because their mama buys all their toiletries! In Poland they found the customer buzz was all centered on the in-store activation campaign not the main TV brand campaign.

 

Fiona also outlined a brilliant extension of TROI into measuring more of the customer need-state experience such as ‘text us whenever you feel you need to smell good. Tell us why and where you are.’

 

The teatime carrot cake was terrific. Those carrots did not die in vain.

 

Emotional advertising and effects

 

Sue Burden echoed the link between emotional advertising and sales. TNS’s measures make excellent use of projective techniques such as faces depicting different attitudes. A key insight is that people can’t say ‘I feel this’ as easily as they can project it: ‘These people feel this’. It also creates more engagement with the survey and improves the quality of the diagnostics.

 

Sue also had the great idea of researching retailers’ Christmas ads because their sales effectiveness are well reported so soon after the event. To her relief the tracking got it right.

 

They found that M&S girls were fighting each other for Antonio Banderas, and this diminished positive affiliative emotion and therefore engagement. Sure enough M&S had a rotten Christmas, as did Tesco with its Spice Girls misfire.

 

Stuart Sullivan-Martin of Mediaedge:cia said we spend too much time measuring ripples, and what’s happened, and not enough on what the message should be.

 

He argued for focused objectives “a single objective in consumer language” (I love it that he added that rider).

 

Media and agency insight

 

For the National Domestic Violence Helpline, qualitative research was the key to understanding the lives of abused spouses. The ‘call our helpline’ message needed to go in environments the male abuser wouldn’t be angry about; for example, the backs of women’s changing room doors and even on the backs of Tesco shopping receipts, a deniable thing to have in your purse. This was the best media insight I’ve seen for ages.

 

Stuart is also using some predictive market techniques, asking respondents not whether they like things, but whether they think it’ll work in the market, thus giving people shares to buy and sell in terms of which ideas to invest in. Again, it generates much better diagnostics.

 

BBH moving forward

 

Finally, Jim Carroll delivered an endearingly transparent view of the challenges facing BBH as it re-engineers itself to fit the changing marketplace in which ‘the age of interruption’ has given way to the ‘age of engagement’.

 

BBH identified that it wanted to be in areas beyond advertising, for example into publishing, and beyond communication to brand creation. Then it went through an entrepreneurial phase of identifying/hiring the best people for it, and is now in a phase of asking: What has this achieved? How does it work?

 

Jim pointed out that, given how engagement works, it can still run mainly in traditional media, and achieving it doesn’t have to mean digital.

 

He also offered the following research/effectiveness challenges:

 

• As there’s just so much of it, what do you measure?
• The time cost is ever more critical, so don’t pretest it: just do it.

Isolating the effects attributable to different channels and agencies is harder, and often clients don’t want it split out.

 

With regards to globalization, BBH develops bundles of communications packages for individual sales territories/countries to buy into, but this top-down approach may not be the most effective way to develop comms for the market.

 

Jim also gave us some useful insights into turf wars. Although creative and media agencies overlap they have different agendas. He outlined three emergent strategies. Agencies can follow the money, the consumer (most media agencies focus on these two) or the idea (BBH’s focus).

 

The big enduring coherent brand idea is even more important, because brands need more glue across media. In the future, clients will work with a looser affiliation of partners but will need the expertise that has been long-developed in ad agencies around the development and the stewardship of big ideas.

 

DAY TWO 

 

The focus today was on measurement.

 

Marc Michaels talked about the difficulties of assessing the many media touchpoints that government communications agencies use, and discussed a tool called Artemis that the COI has now developed which pulls more measures together.

 

His learnings about best practice in evaluation were: get involved early; ask the clients how they expect it to work; and present back in workshops with a narrative not just data. It was interesting to hear that most campaigns get too much response from the educated ‘worried well’. Having done the creative development for the Hook anti-smoking ads, I was fascinated to see the final analysis of its response.

 

Digital measurement

 

Wayne Arnold started with the bombshell that nothing in digital measurement has changed in the three years since he last spoke at MAP. This tunnel vision in the digital industry comes from the fact that major advertisers on digital, such as recruitment, have very immediate metrics (in this case, fill that vacancy).

 

Only 5% of consumer goods adspend goes online. This is, in Wayne’s view, nothing short of a crime, but it is caused by the lack of effective measurements. At last there is a tender going out this year for a digital audience measurement tool. He also offered the following statistics:

 

• 65% of digital traffic doesn’t touch a website: it is peer-to-peer chat
• Only 10% of digital traffic touches a commercial website, so digital agencies need to think wider about interactions.

He quoted Confucious as a great rationale for using digital: ‘Tell me and I will forget. Show me and I will remember. Involve me and I will understand’.

 

The multiplicity of digital metrics don’t show how people have been entertained, involved or engaged. Personally I would be surprised if Wayne feels nothing has changed in another three years. The fact that he knows his digital campaign for Mini influenced about one million people, but doesn’t know how, sounds for me like digital now shares the same issues as conventional advertisers (welcome to the Leverhulme question).

 

As Jim said last night, econometricians working on this year’s IPA Effectiveness Awards entries are trying hard to split out the effect of digital. Case histories will soon emerge. Plus I suspect techniques like SMS research will help to identify more of digital’s effect.

 

Measure the measurable

 

Simon Thompson, of lastminute.com, argued that marketing’s cost is zero. If you have a fab brand, it is a great benefit to the company. You should measure business performance first and marketing second. He asserted that you should measure the measurable, which is a more controversial statement than it sounds.

 

He bravely went live into lastminute.com’s internal dashboard, and showed us the enviable metrics that he can look at in real time.

 

Investors also love the summary metrics, and no longer ask Simon obvious questions. Simon spends £100m on marketing a year, and a further £300-£400k on the dashboard. Simon’s nice problem to have is that investors keep wanting to spend more money on marketing, and he has to find effective ways to spend it.

 

AIDA not for Honda

 

Honda’s Ian Armstrong asked which measures matter. He seemed to take issue with only measuring the measurable; instead, he set out to understand the car buying process in impressive detail.

 

Honda used an academic psychologist to understand the process. They applied tons of science, even measuring galvanic skin response (sweat). They benchmarked the car buying process against a mobile phone and a mortgage.

 

This found that persuasion is the wrong model of brand comms. AIDA also doesn’t apply. Rather, snakes and ladders is definitely more appropriate.

 

Do the money maths

 

David Haigh also started with a bombshell that there has been a monumental failure of the marketing sciences to put the right measures across to finance.

 

Most organizations have a forecast for the next 12 months, and then a hazier view of the longer term. About 10% of a company’s value is represented by the next year’s revenue; the rest of the value of the business is tied up in the hazy long term.

 

Most brand owners can only handle top line measures. There’s the issue of what the business is worth, and a separate issue of how much you can convince audiences such as the stock market what its worth. France Telecom overpaid for Orange by £16 billion because they didn’t do the maths at the time they bought it.

 

It worried me slightly to hear that David (the world leader in this field) typically gets half an hour in which to present his thorough analysis. He pointed out life gets easier for marketers when they are also significant shareholders who understand the ‘should we sell the company on or not’ view and the longer term perceived value of the company

 

Lunch was very good for the second day running. The Jamiroquai Towers is a nice light and calm venue with surprisingly smiley staff.

 

Aim for the analysts

 

In the afternoon, Hamish Pringle told us how the IPA has given up trying to influence hard-bitten CEO and CMOs and targets city analysts instead, whispering into the ears of very intelligent analysts so that they ask the difficult questions to CEOs.

 

I suggested to Hamish over lunch that the IPA should sponsor a guerilla campaign of OAPs to turn up at shareholder AGMs and ask the chairman why his company is using the wrong marketing metrics. He got quite excited about this. (It was meant as a joke, Hamish.)

 

Proving payback

 

PWC’s Andrew Sharp outlined the best practice in payback. He argues that you don’t just subtract costs from sales: as much as 90% of retained profit benefit from advertising is price protection.

Andrew outlined ways of measuring payback bearing in mind the longer term benefits of advertising (an astonishing number of brands which have SOV that is lower than their SOM don’t last a decade) and price measured by ‘distance from the commodity offer’. I enjoyed his observation that the question ‘how much are you prepared to pay for the name alone?’ is one we need to answer. Unfortunately, it is so close to the question ‘How stupid are you?’ that we can’t ask it directly.

 

Bernard Chuddy showed what Millward Brown is doing in the area of putting metrics together, and echoed other speakers in suggesting predisposition (a ‘brand I love’) is the sort of measure we should be looking at more.

 

He also scotched yesterday’s myth that Cadbury’s Gorilla had pre-tested badly. Apparently it researched brilliantly in Link. Oh well.  Never let the truth get in the way of a good story.

Yes! There was carrot cake at teatime. Didn’t wow me quite as much today though.

People were talking over tea about feeling mentally exhausted after two days of great presentations. That’s the trouble with a lack of duff presentations. You don’t get any time to zone out, daydream and relax your cortex.

 

The importance of brands

 

The panel discussion highlighted that the city and the financial community love brands.

Perhaps the problem is that marketing people are rubbish at making the case for ad investment up the line internally (“here come the flower arrangers”) and the CFO cuts the ad budget in the last quarter because he (wrongly) thinks that what the investors want.

 

Reasons to be cheerful came mainly from Hamish (despite his grim Bellwether Report). There is now a legal requirement for boards to report on their intangible asset, providing an opportunity for the brand story to be put across.

 

Smart procurement people can be allies of advertising. Hamish made the observation that the digital companies are using marketing in a different way. Their familiarity with metrics, and real time dashboards like lastminute.com’s, will spread out to the wider marketing community.

 

Behaviour over attitudes

 

Clive Humby echoed a major theme of the conference in telling people to look for behaviour over attitudes. Behavioural data gives you very strong surrogates for attitudes. People say they don’t buy organic products, yet data shows they do (and vice versa). Micro-level, cross-purchasing analysis can also help improve the media schedule (Tesco sells a lot of papers and mags).

 

Only 10% of the brands on sale in a supermarket have a penetration in excess of 5% of that store’s customers; 75% of brands have a penetration below 2%.

 

Clive argued, therefore, for focusing marcoms effort against this tiny, precious base of existing customers, which was curiously at odds with Ehrenburg’s panel-based work over many years and Les Binet’s analysis yesterday. Unfortunately this point came too late in the day to be properly debated.

 

Clive also said we still don’t know how to measure effectiveness. It seems to me that we perhaps we do know more than we think about how to measure effectiveness for the real world of financial investors (who are also fallible, emotionally driven human beings).

 

My cheeky parting thought is that perhaps effectiveness involves helping to create a narrative about the brand that will add to the perceived intangible value of the company. 

 

If it is based on rigorous payback and forecast analysis and modeling, then that’s ideal. But if it isn’t especially rigorous yet still plausible enough to convince France Telecom to overpay you £16 billion, then that’s pretty damn effective too, n’est ce-pas?

In our series of guest posts from speakers at MAP 2008, Profero managing director and IPA Digital chairman Wayne Arnold shares his thoughts on the huge challenges still facing digital marketers. He'll be explaining how we can meet them in his presentation during the opening session of Thursday morning.

The world is becoming increasingly fractured. Consumers no longer exist along traditional broad-stroke demographic lines, but in smaller pockets built around personalities and attitudes. They are younger, smarter and more discerning. How we engage them must be smarter, too. 

It strikes me that there are two options when given the opportunity to speak at a conference such as this. Either use it as a platform from which to congratulate ourselves on how far we have come, how digital is going toe-to-toe with traditional media and generally laud ourselves on a job well done.

Or we can take the opportunity to front-up, be honest and debate what there is still left to do. In truth, we are not even half way there. Yes we are growing, but all good things are relative. Progress is only progress if it is ongoing and restless.

Digital media is equally cursed and blessed by the pace of change. The excitement generated by its growth is plain, but if we do not keep up with consumer needs we are dust. As more brands become digitally aware, adaptation is the key to success and evolution the only way to meet both advertiser and consumer needs.

It is no longer enough for agencies to report on "how many" and "how often". The intelligent consumer is savvier, more demanding and sharper but the tools at our disposal are blunt. Brand relationships and dialogue have replaced impacts and reach, and new and ambitious approaches to measuring effectiveness are the only way to match customers' and technological intelligence.

We can - and should - continue to learn from and incorporate traditional models, but we should offer more. As peer-to-peer, social networking sites, viral video and new technologies allow discerning younger consumers greater access to and new ways to enage with brands, we have an obligation to meet this with forward-thinking insight and expertise.

In my 30 minutes at MAP, I will be tackling head-on this need to evolve effective digital measurements and will be illustrating how we might do it. Too often we nod, agree and then walk away from the glare of potential to return to the comfort of what we know best. I hope that you will all find the opportunities and possibilities as exciting as me.

In our series of guest posts from speakers at MAP 2008, Mesh Planning's managing parter Fiona Blades gives a taster of what her TROI methodology has enabled Unilever's Axe brand to understand about its communications. Fiona will be presenting alongside Unilever's Ana Medeiros on Wednesday afternoon.

I was pleased to see that Simon Thompson had been asked to present about ‘real time’ because Ana Medeiros, Global CMI Manager for Axe and I are talking about ‘Real-time insights for Lynx/Axe’. So I’m hoping that ‘real-time’ might be the latest buzzword!

We presented at MAP last year with our very first case study on Vittel bottle water using a new research approach, TROI (Touchpoints Return on Investment). 

 

Since then, we’ve discovered that what’s special about TROI isn’t simply ROI capabilities around touchpoints, but the fact that by collecting data in real time we can suddenly ask questions we’ve shut ourselves off from asking before:

• How can I compare my in-store activity with my TV in one study? 
• How can I see the spread of word of mouth? 
• Does promotional activity devalue the brand?

At this year’s conference, Ana and I will show how the work we have been doing together on Axe/Lynx answers some of these questions.  In the case of this brand:

 

How quickly did the catchphrase ‘Bom Chicka Wah Wah’ start to get used? 

And was it girls using it to flirt with boys or little brothers using it to annoy their older siblings? 

And why, when it had award-winning TV advertising and the same ads as in Poland, was Italy not seeing sales storm ahead in the way that sales were in Poland? 

 

The Republic of Axe is the maverick within the world of Unilever and Ana was looking for research that would take a 360-degree approach to evaluating brand activity. At the same time, we at MESH Planning were looking for a client brave enough to try our new research approach. 

 

TROI’s practical, direct and straightforward.  If someone sees the TV ad or hears a conversation they text and they tell us what they felt about it at the time.  If they see it later and they feel differently about it, they tell us that too. Each text is a little moment of truth, captured before it gets forgotten in the hurly burly of everyday life. 

 

When you add thousands of these together in one study you build a rich and believable picture where the truth is often stranger than the recall-based fiction we have grappled with for years.

 

Ana might urge you to take the RED PILL!  But don’t worry, it will taste good and could open up a whole new way of understanding how to engage people with your brand.

In our series of guest posts from speakers at MAP 2008, Millward Brown's director of marketing science Bernard Chudy previews the themes of his presentation and invites you to post any comments or questions in advance. You can catch Bernard's presentation on the afternoon of day two.

Having spent a good proportion of the last few months developing new approaches to measuring advertising performance, I am really looking forward to next week’s conference as a chance to share ideas and catch up on what other people have been doing.

I also think it’s a particularly exciting time to be going to this type of event, as it sounds like there are lots of great ideas around to address the new challenges we are all facing.

 

On my part, I’ve been focused on developing brand health measures that drive long-term sales growth, the brand image measures that drive these, and the effectiveness of advertising in getting across the right messages.

 

There are two areas that I’ll be touching on in my talk which I find particularly exciting.

 

The first is segmenting audience into specific groups:

• Those already converted to the brand;
• Those that can be persuaded by the right communication; and
• Those that simply don’t engage with the brand.

This enables us to look at key messages that connect with those open to persuasion groups, build trial amongst them and create long term growth.

 

The second key area I’ll be talking about is how to disentangle the impact of different media - especially when everything is happening at once, with local activities supporting national and global campaigns, and when different media play different roles in building brand health.

 

Hopefully these are areas that will also excite others and generate interesting discussion. If anybody wants to post questions and challenges I will also try to build these into may talk. So look I forward to seeing you all there and catching up with anybody that wants to chat some more.

In our series of guest posts from speakers at MAP 2008, Lastminute.com Group's chief marketing officer Simon Thompson previews his thoughts on what real-time accountability measures actually mean and trails some of the plans he has for his presentation. Catch his keynote at 11am on day two.

"Would you like to present a session on marketing accountability?", said the conference organiser's voice.
 
Since I have been asked this on many ocassions, generally from finance folk, I felt this was a straightforward enough subject and duly accepted.
 
Seemed a good descision until the "real time measures" element was added; oh yes, and a slot of no more than 30 minutes.
 
So I thought, what exactly does "real time" mean?
 
In the last few years I have had the joy of operating in three completely different organisations, Honda, Motorola and lastminute.com, with three completely different views of patience; patience is my current definition of "real time".
 
In automotive the new product cycle is c.6 years so the definition of "real time" in this category is anywhere from 12 years, about the amount of time it takes to re-position a brand, to 30 days, the constant obsession with monthly market share statistics. I did also work for the Japanese company which was happy to see a thirty year "marketing" plan.
 
In telecoms a new product comes along every six months, so in this category, brand (product!) re-positioning has a six months patience window; unless you are on the retail end, in which case it tends to be focused on a weekly basis.
 
In the land of on-line retail, patience is not a strength; any marketing taking more than a few hours to generate an effect has instant suspicion cast over it!
 
All that said, there is one thing that I have found works for all categories.
 
Always "measure the measurable"; this means measure those things that "simple" finance people understand and measure business performance before marketing performance.
 
If you have to explain your measure in more than two sentences, then believe me, finance and/or your CEO will have already lost interest.
 
Getting to the point in a few words is not a natural strength of the average marketeer.
 
My presentation next week will address the question of what measures do "simple" finance people understand and how do you track them in real time.
 
I have seen many presentations that "talk the talk", so after ten minutes and a few slides, I intend to show a live demo of the on-line marketing dashboard that lastminute.com group has just implemented ... conference technology allowing.
 
It is not a complete project as yet, but it already allows all stakeholders to see the critical information live on an internal portal whenever they wish.
 
For those among you who like to slide count, the presentation has ten slides (excluding titles), contains 59 words and will last no more then ten minutes.
 
So ten minutes presentation, ten minutes demo and ten minutes left over for questions.
 
I am hopefully this will be in line with the average marketing conference attendees real-time attention (patience) level.

 
With 27 top speakers over two days, MAP 2008 is set to be (as the cliché goes) our biggest and best MAP conference yet - and we’ve been running this event for over 10 years now.

 

To celebrate, I thought I’d gather together a quick taster of what we’ve got to look forward to. So what follows are some recent papers from WARC.com, penned by some of the very same people who’ll be taking the stage in two weeks’ time. 

All papers are all free to view until at least a few days after the conference.

 

Opening the first day will be former planner and now academic, Dr Robert Heath. So it seems fitting to point you in the direction of Brand relationships – strengthened by emotion, weakened by attention, a paper from the Journal of Advertising Research that explores the influence and importance of emotional drivers in advertising effectiveness.

 

Later that morning, the US marketing professor Bobby J Calder will be giving a keynote on engagement metrics. You can get some background to his thinking by reading a paper he delivered to ESOMAR’s WM3 conference last summer on the importance of editorial context to advertising effectiveness.

 

And we close day one with BBH’s UK Chairman, Jim Carroll. Jim will be talking about the ‘re-engineered agency’ and the implications it holds for remuneration, research and measurement. Prior to this, you can read up now on his 10 principles for marketing in the age of engagement.

 

One of the key themes of day two is long-term measurement, a topic on which PWC’s director of brand economics and finance, Andrew Sharp, will open the afternoon session. You’d do well to read Demonstrating payback, his analysis of how well the 2006 IPA Effectiveness Awards’ winners demonstrated their contribution to profit.

 

And if you last the full, two-day distance, then you’ll be hearing the final keynote from dunhumby founder, Clive Humby, on the need for new metrics in a customer-centric age. You might get some clues as to what those metrics are by taking a look at a paper published by his dunnhumby colleague and MAP 2008 discussion panellist, Martin Hayward, on How to be a customer champion.

 

Of course, WARC.com has loads more stuff on all the topics slated for MAP. But to explore anymore, you’ll need to take a trial.

I'm pleased to let you know that Chris Forrest, co-founding partner of the qualitative brand and advertising research firm The Nursery, will be blogging at MAP 2008 (veterans from MAP 2007 might remember the great blog he did at last year's event).

Prior to starting The Nursery in 2001, his career included time as a freelance researcher for several UK and European agencies, planning director at Duckworth, Finn, Grubb, Waters and 5 years at Ogilvy & Mather where he became the youngest ever board director. 

And when he's not doing his day job or blogging at MAP, Chris sits on the Market Research Society conferences committee, runs WARC's own annual consumers and advertising conference and is also 'module editor' for the IPA Diploma's People and Brands module, putting together a list of key texts, setting and marking essays for 'Advertising's in-house MBA'.

In short, MAP 2008 is in good hands.

Welcome to the MAP 2008 blog.

Full details of this year's event - now taking place over two days - are available at the WARC bookstore.

But check back here shortly for the latest conference news, together with guest posts from speakers and some recommended pre-event reading on WARC.com (including some free stuff).

Meantime, you can refresh your memory of last year's event with the MAP 2007 blog.