January 25, 2023
If there was any doubt that the advertising world has shifted from branding to performance as its chief "KPI," or key performance indicator, it should be laid to rest by an in depth study of marketers of all sizes being released today by the Advertising Research Foundation.
"Sales," not "brand …
To the extent that this type of study can be interpreted as drawing a distinction between "large" and "small" advertisers, it appears that the latter are simply less into the KPI concept. Note the "don't know" answer with 27% of the "small advertiser" respondents admitting that they didn't know compared to only 18% for their "large advertiser" counterparts. Supporting this, the average "large advertiser" respondent cited 2.1 of the 6 metrics while the small fry opted for only 1.7. Yet, both groups rated sales---"performance"---- about the same. As you point out, Joe, it will be interesting to see whether the use of more---or fewer---metrics, aside from sales has predictive values relative to how much advertising each type of advertiser employs during the epidemic. Is keeping things simple better? We shall see.