The point of using a significant portion of business dollars is to earn a return wherever it’s invested.  Sometimes this is tangible, meaning advertising and marketing campaigns can be tracked by the penny.  Other times, the much sought after ROI is attained via exposure and brand penetration.  While small businesses may spend more time tracking ads dollar for dollar, what about the big corporations with huge spending budgets?

 

We can assume companies that advertise on Super Bowl Sunday aren’t your average start-up. While employees, consultants, and stat trackers alike will be glued to their computer screens come Feb. 3rd, do companies pay this close of attention year round?

 

Are big companies tracking their ROI dime for dime, or only when a whopper of an ad hits the big time - or goes bust like the Golden Globes?  The answer appears to be yes.

 

Web 2.0 quickly took online ads from slightly sticky to dynamic sponges that absorb every last drop of attainable user information.  However, with big companies, the people tracking the effectiveness of these ads usually aren’t employed in-house.  Companies like Allstate, American Express, and IBM use advertising giant, Ogilvy, to create, run, and well as analyze every last bit of web induced data available.

 

According to Paul Slogan’s article in Business 2.0, “Ogilvy’s in-house optimizer runs 5,000 to 10,000 calculations each time it evaluates the performance of an ad campaign.  The optimizer collects data on scores or even thousands of ads and analyzes which ones are working, and why, on the fly.”(excerpted from an article previously posted on www.cnnmoney.com).

 

As our media devices grow and change (they may all be featured at MacWorld this week) it will become even more difficult to track the successess and failures of each individual campaign.  Software will catch up however, and soon data from every portal will be seamlessly synced and ready to, well, determine if it made any money or not.    

This entry was posted on Monday, January 14th, 2008 at 4:32 pm and is filed under All Marketing. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Responses are currently closed, but you can trackback from your own site.