Re: [projectvrm] Multifunctional Advertising

[Katherine Warman Kern < >]

Sylvan and Chris,

As a practicing planner who takes pride in being a trusted advisor, I'd like 
to share some insights from the perspective of my clients.

The reality the consumer has an overabundance of choices and a marketer has 
an overabundance of tools to choose from. 

But the number of hours in a day to make those choices has remained exactly 
the same.

As the number of choices have increased, the odds that bad choices are made 
increases.  

Share of Voice, as many measuring sticks, is flawed from the start because 
there is no truly accurate way to measure or project it.  One marketer can 
spend the same amount of dollars much more effectively than another.  And 
since few marketers publish their mistakes, no one really knows what really 
happened. In fact most published accounts of marketing case studies have very 
little resemblance to what really happened.

I continue to be shocked that no new entry capitalizes on digital technology 
and social media to offer an improvement over Nielsen to monitor integrated 
marketing in real time.  

K-

Katherine Warman Kern
www.comradity.com
@comradity
203-918-2617

On Feb 17, 2013, at 9:37 AM, sylvain willart 
<
 >
 wrote:

> This "tragedy of the commons" made me think when you first posted about it.
> The sheep example you mention is well-studied in economic game theory,
> and there are some writings as well in Public Economics sudies dealing
> with scarce resources,
> But I very rarely read this kind of thinking in advertising/marketing.
> Only perhaps in "Store Wars" (Corstjens & Corstjens , 90's). Actually,
> the hypothesis of the consumer brain being a scarce resource is
> sometimes discussed, but never measured. And media planning relying
> heavily on measures and metrics, this hypothesis does not well fit in
> traditional approaches.
> Moreover, you can expect people to protect scarce natural resources
> (even if they loose direct advantage) for the sake of a "bigger cause"
> involving altruism (a long studied effect in game theory); but who
> really cares about the exhaustion of conusmer brain? there is nothing
> here a good night of sleep can't fix... (the consumer himself may be
> the only one to care, hence the importance of VRM tools IMHO).
> Media planning is also competitive by nature, and while planning you
> have to care more about your competitors' expenses than your
> consumers' ability to process all those ads. An important metric in
> media planning is for example the "share of voice" (your expenses
> divided by the market expenses), perhaps the dumbest metric ever
> invented, as it is known from long it is not robust at all (meaning it
> can lead you to make stupid planning choices)
> The entropy hypothesis however may be quite appealing, and this metric
> is often used in other field of marketing (for measuring variety of
> assortments for example). I'll try to dig into it to see wether it has
> been used in advertising/intrusiveness research.
> 
> Sylvain
> 
> 
> 2013/2/17 Chris Savage 
> <
 >:
>> Sylvain,
>> 
>> Thank you, this is very helpful.  I will ponder a bit more.
>> 
>> I have mentioned, perhaps on this list, my sense that there is a "tragedy 
>> of
>> the commons" effect going on among those who would sell me stuff.  Just 
>> like
>> in the Garrett Hardin story where each shepherd looks at the common field
>> and thinks, "Oh, letting one or two extra sheep from my flock graze won't
>