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Billetts' Be Ready for the Recovery event, held on Friday, attracted an impressive line-up of speakers, including Tim Orton, director of planning and marketing at Specsavers, and Colin Cook, head of recruitment marketing for the British Army.

The central theme was "continuous improvement", with speakers voicing the perennial case for marketers and agencies to make their profession more accountable at boardroom level.

Nick Manning, Ebiquity and Billetts chief operating officer, said in his opening comments as chair of the event: "Marketing could and should play a central role in recovering from the economic downturn."
The event followed the published last week, which showed that eight out of 10 marketers felt that their businesses were more focused on return on investment than they were a year ago.

Andrew Marsden, a former marketing director for Britvic and now a consultant, gave a controversial speech arguing that the sector needs to change, that marketers need to become more financially literate, and that marketing needs to adopt rigour and measurability, and consequently gain the respect of the boardroom.

Marsden said: "The discipline of marketing is not understood by most boards and we've failed to make it understood by those boards. If we're going to have a future, we have to adopt more business procedures."

Marketing people are "hidden behind building brands", he argued, while the financial people are "obsessed with financial returns".

"In times of stress like now, those differences boil over in the boardroom."

Marketing's role should be to "maximise shareholder value", but marketers have been "bullied into believing their role is to deliver short-term profit," he told the audience.

Highlighting the longevity of brands, Marsden said: "Brands are very strong, hugely resilient. In some markets, like cornflakes and toothpaste, the brand leader has been the brand leader for over 70 years.

"Who is responsible for managing our brands? Is it HR? No. Is it procurement? No. Is it sales? Not bloody likely. Is it finance? No. It's us. It's marketing."

He went on to reference a worrying statistic thrown up by Billetts' pre-event survey. "Only 33% thought that ROI was definitely a good thing," he said.

"It's inconceivable that we don't measure things and talk numbers in the boardroom. Don't
let perfect measurement get in the way of good measurement. We must justify and express
what we do in numbers."

Specsavers' Orton described himself as being in the unusual position of having "a board of directors and an MD that get the value of marketing. "It puts me in a fortunate and rare situation where we are not having to cut budgets," he said.

Orton, a vehement advocate of the need for measurement, said pre and post-campaign auditing enabled Specsavers to make significant savings by working out where budget can be shifted from one media and into another so it is more effectively redeployed.

Agencies, he argued, are more familiar with post-evaluation than pre, but cited Mediaedge:cia as an agency that understands pre-campaign evaluation.

He said: "It allows us to be wise before the event. We can choose to make savings and redeploy the
money elsewhere."

But Orton did relay some concerns raised by his media agency -- that arguably Billetts could be in a position where it is "marking its own homework" -- for example, in a situation in which a campaign is over-delivered by 10%, when the agency might be penalised. MEC's suggestion was to build in a mechanism where the blame is "diluted".

Colin Cook, marketing director for recruitment at The British Army, highlighted the need for integration and in particular for integrating reputation management into an overarching marketing and communications strategy.

Cook was adamant that reputation management must be integral to a brand's marketing and
communications strategy, for the former can impact both positively and negatively on the
best-devised marketing campaign.

The Army's marketing has to take into account how factors such as press reports can impact on its overall reputation and affect its marketing.

He said: "I have two aims in terms of reputation. Firstly, to improve our reputation as an employer and secondly the reputation of the organisation as a whole."

In the midst of a recruitment marketing drive, the Army might face a series of negative stories in the press, such as stories of casualties in Afghanistan.

"If the PR is negative, it has an immediate effect on the numbers of people who want to join the Army."

So, monitoring what is being said in the press and in blogs and social networking sites is vital. Cook said: "The management of reputation requires you to recognise the environment in which you're working, not to deny it or hide it."

Nick Manning, COO of Billetts, speaking at the event: