Introduce performance metrics in budgeting – Olubodun
By Felicia Nwosu
As industry practitioners continue to grapple with the global shrinking economy by way of cutting marketing spend, Feyi Olubodun, Founder and Managing Partner of Open Squares Africa, has urged agencies to introduce performance metrics into their budgeting equation. This, he said, is a new approach to calculating the efficiency of advertising campaigns in order to optimise marketing budgets effectively.
In an interview with MARKETING EDGE, Olubodun maintained that practitioners must make a bold move to convince and advise clients against cutting adspend. This, he noted, is by pushing for a change in performance through the creation of new set-ups and models that will reconfigure the media budget outcome. According to him, this will enable brands to achieve their desired result on both return on investment and effective engagement with consumers through the chosen marketing strategy.
“The solution to that really, is something that the industry has been trying to do for a long time, and I think you have to put skill in the game. Practitioners should be able to go to clients to say we don’t think you should cut your marketing spend for various reasons. This is because you may need to spend more in your marketing to stimulate growth, but we are willing to put skill in the game, which means practitioners need to begin to introduce performance metrics into the equation. We will deliver on certain fronts and we are willing to tie a portion of our income or earnings to being able to work with you to deliver this.
“If we don’t bring the performance conversation into that whole discussion, then it will be difficult to say to clients not to cut budgets, because you have to convince them on why they should not cut it. They are also trying to protect their bottom line, unless you can show them that what you are going to do for them will actually stimulate growth and that you are willing to put some skill in the game – that is when that conversation can advance,” he said.
In re-thinking how media is valued with key performance to ROI, the marketing strategist also emphasized the need to acquire the required kind of data which is the secondary syndicated data on a large scale. He pointed out that a lot of clients have budgets for gathering data for consumer insights.
The seasoned business leader revealed that the industry, overtime, has been hindered by various challenges before the advent of the pandemic which has stunted its growth when compared with advertising in other climes.
“From my observation of the IMC, it is an industry that is struggling to reinvent itself; it is a struggle that has been going on for many years. The impact of Covid-19 in the year 2020-2021, sort of slowed down certain structural changes that could have been made, even though the industry did leverage that to change how they communicate with consumers. If you look at last year, it looks like that reinvention is still ongoing, but the industry is not there yet. They are closer than where they were in the previous years, but the change is not visible and significant enough for us to say we have a totally reinvented industry,” he concluded.
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