This piece was originally published in Forbes.
KPI mentality drives bad behavior and poor marketing results.
Even as organizations sunset the obsession with performance marketing, a habit of focusing too narrowly on performance indicators persists. This mindset lacks the flexibility and agility necessary to operationalize a modern marketing strategy, often leading to an over-fixation on the front end development of campaigns. As a result, even the simplest executions are subjected to prolonged tinkering before they ever reach an inbox, social feed, or television screen.
The issue with this way of thinking can be likened to the now-infamous words of basketball legend Allen Iverson, who once indignantly responded to a reporter's question about practice. In short, he emphasized that it’s not about how hard you practice, it’s about how you perform in the game.
Surrounding details aside, Iverson had a point.
In marketing, “practice” represents the initial campaign build and pre-testing phase. The game is the moment you put that work into the world. Great marketing teams succeed because of the optimizations made once their work is in flight, not because they overengineered it beforehand. Even the best ideas will need to be optimized.
On the On Strategy Showcase podcast, Sorin Patilinet, Senior Director Global Marketing Effectiveness at Mars Food, noted his team has largely moved away from pre-testing after finding its correlation with sales was only slightly better than a coin toss.
“For me, pre-testing is a predictive measure of effectiveness, and it will never be 100% true,” he said. According to Patilinet, there are very few instances where a campaign needs to be absolutely perfect before it goes live. Instead, his team finds it a more informative and effective approach to put an ad live, test it in flight, and then continue or change according to the results.
The Way Forward: Breaking Old Team Structures
One of the biggest challenges in driving this behavioral shift is overcoming pre-existing team structures.
During my time in the agency world, I’ve often heard complaints that client team silos create issues when getting work approved and live. While there is some truth to this, it’s not where I’ve seen the biggest obstacles. Worse and more often is that silos break campaigns when it comes time to optimize.
The performance death trap previously sucked marketing team members into specific swimlanes. Each individual team was obsessively working toward a specific KPI they were being measured against. While this might inflate individual goals, it often fragments the campaign to a point where it starts to work against itself. Modern marketing is a team sport that requires a unified focus on business goals rather than individual performance.
Speaking at the Brand Innovators’ Future of Creativity conference, Erin Goldson, PR & Influencer Marketing Lead at Unilever, emphasized this point, noting consumers’ increasing demand for brands to be culturally relevant requires marketing teams to be more unified than ever. Culture moves quickly, she noted, and it’s not something that can be planned for a year or, at times, even a week in advance. There must be clear leadership and structure in place to support shifts in strategy and rapid execution of those shifts across channels. “You have to plan for agility,” she said.
The responsibility, however, is not with brand-side marketing teams alone. It requires partnership from agile agency teams as well–which still remain difficult to find. Research from McKinsey found that only 3% of marketing executives characterized their transition to agile marketing with their partners as “smooth,” while 80% reported facing obstacles.
Agencies must be as integrated and fast-moving as they expect their client teams to be if they want to be effective partners. Everyone involved must know what they’re measuring, how to get the insights, and how to optimize in an integrated way. If disparate agencies are spending too much time chasing individual channel efficiencies, they cannot focus on overall campaign effectiveness.
The strategy and creativity behind an initial campaign launch are critical, but that’s only part of the equation. Marketers must remember: You win in the game, not in practice. The most effective campaigns are those that start with great ideas, are put into the market, and then optimized in real-time.
