Alex discusses how he’s helping companies to find the right balance between performance marketing and brand building, why he loves a recent Apple ad, and what makes a great presentation.
What’s the biggest marketing effectiveness challenge that your clients are facing currently?
There are two big challenges that many of them are facing at the moment. First, they’re trying to navigate the same inflationary pressures that consumers are facing. Second, they’re trying to find the right balance between performance marketing and brand building.
What are some of the ways that these challenges can be overcome?
It’s important to have a holistic understanding of marketing’s role in a business. With today’s analytical approaches, we can quantify marketing’s short-term impact and how it’s contributing to the business through brand equity over the longer term. Once we know those two things, we can understand the trade-offs between performance and brand media and make better informed budget decisions. For example, we know it’s important to invest in brand equity to maintain or grow share-of-wallet and cultivate consumers’ brand preferences.
How much of a challenge is getting the right insights at the right time from these analytical approaches?
If I think about the CPG clients I work with, it’s true that many of them have had difficulty in getting granular insights in a timely manner. Historically, this is because they’ve relied on user-level attribution, which is problematic for CPG companies as they don’t own their own conversion data. Sensor™, Gain Theory’s multichannel, privacy-compliant attribution solution, was developed to solve this problem. CPG companies are using the near-time, granular insights from Sensor™ to answer important questions – ‘what just happened?’, ‘why did it happen?’ and ‘what might happen next?’ – and make in-flight optimizations that drive growth.
What’s the best advert you’ve seen recently?
I really enjoyed Apple’s Mother Nature ad. Not only was it clever but its message of ‘get things done’ really resonated with me. It ties back to one of Gain Theory’s core values, ‘Make It Better’, which I interpret as, if you see something that needs to be done, do it!
Talking of making things better, you lead presentation development training for all our people in North America – what tips can you share for creating a great presentation?
I think one of the most important things when sitting down to write a presentation is to really think through the message you are trying to convey to your audience. Often, we are too eager to put pen to paper. It’s important to be purposeful with your communication and ensure that every slide, chart, and bullet serves your ultimate goal.
What podcast would you recommend?
One that I’ve been following and listening to for a long time is ‘How I Built This’. It interviews entrepreneurs of companies that are both new and old. As well as the origins of each company, it delves into some of the challenges that each person has faced and how they overcame them. It also highlights how the individual’s personality is reflected in the company they started.
Contact Alex to discuss any of the issues raised in this Q&A.