brandknewmag.com
22
“We want to find that intersection between what’s happening in real-time culture—
what our consumer interests and desires are—and what our brand purpose and
meaning is.”
eMarketer: How do you measure your real-time marketing?
Singh: We ran a really awesome program called #GoInSix over the past six months, where we took real-time insights
and developed five or six creative options. [Editor’s Note: The multiplatform social media effort used 6-second Vine
videos, six-word tweets and other short-form content to encourage consumers to do something they love to do—shop
and travel, among other activities.] Through automated testing on Facebook, we saw which worked best, and then we
scaled it with ad spend. We did this several times a week. We tracked the shared impressions, earned impressions, the
total impressions and the average cost per impression.
What we are going to do more of in 2014 is tying all of this much more tightly to the brand, such as by doing brand
Nielsen studies and working with partners to show the measurable impact on payment volume where we can.
Now, this all sounds fancy and impressive. But the huge caveat and the huge reality, which I don’t think anyone has
figured out, is getting scale in real-time marketing—and not just scale, but predictable, repeatable scale. Brands are
in the business of predictability and repeatability. We have quarterly earnings and need to be able to track marketing’s
contribution to the business. Real-time marketing is still in its infancy, in its early, early days, because you can’t track as
effectively the scale and the predictability and the repeatability of it. And I think that’s what we’re going to crack this year.
Partners like Datalogix and Acxiom help us understand the offline impact of [online] brand actions. The more challenging
piece is that we don’t have any benchmarks [for real-time marketing]. With our TV spend, we know what it does for our
business because we have a 20-, 30-, 40-year history, and we know what certain numbers mean. Here, we have to see in
any given week how much scale we are getting, with what level of investment and what level of payment volume impact
is happening. And therefore, what are the right benchmarks to have?
“Real-time marketing is still in its infancy, in its early, early days, because you can’t
track as effectively the scale and the predictability and the repeatability of it.”
eMarketer: Can you compare the results of what you’re doing in real-time with marketing that’s more traditional or
more evergreen?
Singh: It’s a little frustrating for me because I don’t think as an industry we’ve moved forward enough on the analytics
front. On the finance side of our organization, everything can still go into a profit-and-loss statement on a balance
sheet. It’s a single currency for conversation and for understanding the business. With real-time marketing, you have to
normalize it against other marketing strategies or tactics. It shouldn’t be thought of as a privileged child.
You have to focus on reach with large brands like ours. You have to focus on the resonance or the level of engagement,
the quality of engagement. You have to focus on what impact does it have on the brand, and do you have a way to
measure that impact that’s normalized with the way you measure the impact from other marketing activities, and then
what impact it has on the bottom line.
eMarketer: In the early days of social, a lot of brands had a gut feeling that they needed to be there. Is the same
true of real-time marketing—that right now maybe it’s more of a gut feeling—and they’re hoping over time to be able
to prove it through metrics and measurement?
Singh: I think it’s at a confusing stage where there isn’t clarity around what real-time marketing is, because it’s all so
buzz-driven. I don’t think necessarily that every brand needs to play significantly in it. I think what every brand needs to
do is to recognize that for them to succeed they have to be participants and contributors and curators in culture vs. being
interrupters and distractors. And that may happen in more of a real-time fashion or it may not.
I think a brand can get it so wrong so quickly by just saying, “Oh, we need to do something here. Let’s just go and try.”
I would say that they need to know what their brand stands for—and know really well. And knowing that, then it’s easy
to know how to play in real-time marketing. And it will probably come naturally in many ways.