Making performance marketing work for brands in the age of Facebook is one of the biggest challenges facing many marketers – but there is nothing new about this, Eve Sleep's chief marketing officer has argued.
Cheryl Calverley was speaking on a panel on "new brand behaviours" at the IPA's EffWeek event in London.
Asked what hasn't changed about marketing over the years, Calverley said: "Everything. Nothing changes – people haven't changed, the way creative works and the way advertising works and media channels work hasn't changed. We're now just delivering our products through different channels and communicating through different channels.
"But performance marketing has always been there – it used to be called direct mail and Yellow Pages, and now it's just done on Facebook in exactly the same principles as ever and you can measure it more accurately now."
Oliver Snoddy, vice-president of brand at Deliveroo, agreed: "I think it's always been about consistency and emotional connection. It just now happens that to be consistent is more challenging because now there are an infinite number of touchpoints. But I think human psychology hasn't changed and that's at the heart of what this [marketing] is."
Pros and cons of live data in the digital age
Snoddy added that Deliveroo was an interesting brand to market because its touchpoints with consumers are multiple – the experience of the food, interation with the drivers and the app itself. The brand has access to lots of data, he said, to help inform performance.
The panel spoke about the importance of data, but cautioned about the need to view performance data in context so as to be guided by it, instead of being fixated on it in the short term.
"It's literally postcode by postcode, town by town, country by country. Literally, we're drowning in data – orders are streaming in right now," Snoddy said. "I think it's very easy to fall into the trap of focusing on short-term metrics. The challenge is also about thinking about long-term metrics in terms of brand. Half the job is getting a business to be willing to focus on those things."
Abba Newbery, chief marketing officer at Habito, added: "Habito is super data-driven; we watch every movement of every number, every single day and every single minute of the day, which is both good and terrible, as we're small enough for most of those data movements to be not statistically significant.
"The hard thing for us is to work out what are the important and unimportant movements – and the hardest thing for me is to not let marketing be judged in the short term."
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