The Fournaise Marketing Group tracked cross-channel advertising campaigns of its Large, SME and Agency clients across all media - including traditional and online - in 20 countries worldwide and found out that 19% less customer response and engagement in the first half of 2011 has been generated compared to the first half of 2010.

Fournaise used its cloud-based Next Gen Demand Generation Tracking solutions - Fournaise CustomerGeneratorTM and Campaigns Performance SoftScoreTM - to get insights into the real-time ability of its clients’ cross-channel advertising campaigns to generate direct and indirect engagement with their target audience.

Fournaise tracked that:

  • Advertising response fell the most in mature markets (US, Europe and Australia) at 23%. Developing markets like China and Southeast Asia were not spared and faced a 16% decrease in customer engagement with advertising.
  • B2C and B2B ad campaigns were both affected: B2C struggled to generate incremental customer demand with a 20% fall in customer response and engagement rates, while B2B campaigns experienced an 18% decrease.
  • Online ads continued their downward spiral and were 25% less effective than traditional ads for incremental customer demand generation – online display ads and sponsorships were particularly hit, with a 26% and 35% decrease in customer engagement respectively.

Based on the critical campaign performance tracking data and target audience analyses, Fournaise identified three key reasons for this fall in customer response and engagement, supporting their clients to take appropriate corrective actions:

  • Given the global economic situation, consumers and businesses have been very prudent, conservative and pragmatic with their spending in the first half of 2011, and have been much less receptive to advertising messages.
  • The advertising campaigns themselves were less effective: their appeal, value propositions and message relevance scored too low on their target audience in the majority of these cases and failed to drive more customers towards the products/services advertised.
  • Marketers and their agencies continued spending too much of their time and money on building awareness through “creativity” and new media, instead of taking the pragmatic approach of focusing on the customer benefits and competitive strengths their products/services bring to their target audience.

“At a time when CEOs and stakeholders are asking marketing to achieve better results and a better marketing ROI to get more customer demand, a 19% decrease in advertising response is alarming” said Jerome Fontaine, CEO & Chief Tracker of Fournaise.

“We noticed a real down-to-earth effort from ROI marketers to try to correct that trend, but we also noticed that too many traditional marketers lost sight of the fact that the job of their ad campaigns is to generate customer demand for their products/services, not to just look pretty and clever in the media” he added.

Source: Fournaise Marketing Group