‘It’s all double duty’: A CMO, a CEO and an agency boss on brand v performance myths, the ‘mother metric’, and expensive mistakes to avoid

The marketing funnel doesn’t exist, suggests RAA CMO, Michael Healy. He thinks “too many marketers get too ideological about how you have to do brand and then awareness and then conversion”. He has an interesting anecdote about a $329 knife, his wife, and Meta, to support the theory.

Healy says “the vast majority of marketers that I talk to – from startup to enterprise – don't actually have a marketing strategy.” They just have “a plan and a budget”. He recommends reading Richard Rumelt’s Good Strategy, Bad Strategy – and stop treating brand and performance separately.

“It's all performance and it's all brand,” per Healy. “Everything is double duty.”

Equally, he urges marketers to focus on the metrics that matter: “What is driving business performance?”

Tammy Barton, CEO and founder of MyBudget is the brand, literally. Along with its customers, Barton features in its ads. The one time she changed tack, at the suggestion of “one of Australia’s largest agencies”, it backfired. Results tanked and she had to pull the expensive series of TVCs. She put the old ads back on TV “and leads immediately that week went up 15 per cent”. She shot low cost new versions – still using real customers – “and leads went up another 40 per cent”, says Barton. “So you just do whatever works.”

MyBudget’s marketing team looks at “hundreds of metrics”, she says. “But the ones that are really important to us are, what is it costing us per lead? What is it costing us per contract? What is it costing us per acquisition, including our sales expense? And we have to look at our lifetime value … versus what are we investing for that cost of acquisition, and what is that ratio? We track that every month.”

Atomic 212° co-founder and Chief Digital Officer, James Dixon, thinks media agencies “have been guilty of metric vomit over the years”, spewing data and numbers at clients.

Dixon suggests only one “mother metric” is required: MROI – which can stand for marketing return on investment, or, in the media agency context, media return on investment.

To underline how media is delivering returns, Atomic 212° has been “doubling down on MMM” with clients, but focusing on media, rather than broader variables within market mix models.

RAA’s Healy thinks Dixon “is onto something”, though, “I just don't think it's applicable in all circumstances”.

Either way, he backs MyBudget’s Barton: “Just test everything. Whatever works, do that. And if it doesn’t work, get out of it, fast.”

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