Incrementality is the key word in marketing today, and if a CMO can prove they are delivering it, they can request and expect unlimited marketing budget to spend! That was the message from Avinash Kaushik, Chief Strategy Officer at Croud (the performance-focused media agency) to senior brand buyers and agency media planners at The Future of Media London earlier this month. He said a focus on incrementality will make the CMO bullet-proof from the CFO when they are demanding results and evidence.
“Incrementality is what we should obsess about if we want better marketing. Incrementality means business results from marketing tactics that would not have occurred otherwise,” Kaushik told the audience. “At most companies, if they fire everyone in the marketing department, their profits will go up immediately. Marketers need to demonstrate that they will be missed, and missed next week and not only 2-3 years later. You do that by showing the incremental impact of your work.”
Kaushik advised something akin to an audit, starting with the channels you use for marketing. “Say you are pushing $10 million a month to Google. What would happen if you made that zero? It is free to find the answer – most channels can give you that number. Every channel should be able to tell you about channel silo incrementality. Do this first.”
Next, work out where you can make savings when combining different channels, he advised. If you spend $4 million on two channels today, combined, the same impact may be possible with $3.7 million because $300,000 of spend is not driving incremental outcomes. Kaushik said conversion lift studies are available free from major platforms, and he advocated large-scale controlled experiments to see how you can shift budget from one channel to another.
Returning to his core theme, Kaushik said CMOs must be ready to tell a CFO: ‘Give us $X million and we will add $Y million to it’. Then use that figure to ask for more money. “If you are not using incrementality as the guide, there is no accountability to what you do,” he stressed.
