Bill Bernbach once said: “I warn you against believing that advertising is a science.” But in tough economic times when CFOs begin to question and cut budgets, many marketing people feel the pressure – or are outright asked – to justify their brand advertising through scientific measurement.

     This is dangerous ground.

     We can measure practically anything in this business: awareness, preference, recall, linkage, attention, motivation, ad nauseum. We can tell you where a reader’s eyes focus when seeing an ad for the first time. We can tell you when viewers are bored or entertained during commercials.

     But it’s a slippery slope when someone asks you to prove a campaign’s ROI. You can throw millions of dollars into a black box to do this. And the owner of that black box will give you a very thick report detailing a campaign’s effectiveness. I’ve seen those reports. I’ve worked for agencies whose clients took a lot of money out of their media or production budgets in order to have those reports produced. Personally, I’ve never trusted any of them. 

     Why? One simple reason. Since we’re just coming out of an election, let me borrow a concept from politics: exit polling. Exit polling is simple. A person with a clipboard stands outside of a voting location. After someone votes, Clipboard Guy asks how they voted. Tally up the answers and you have a fairly decent idea of how each candidate is doing.

     Now, apply that methodology to an ad. Put someone with a clipboard next to a reader or TV viewer or radio listener. After each ad or commercial, have them ask one question: “Will the ads you just saw make you buy a particular shoe/switch your checking account to another bank/stop at the grocery on the way home just to buy the new flavor of Pop Tart?”

     If you think anyone would actually admit that they were influenced by an ad, I have a black box ROI calculator I’d like to sell you for a few million dollars.

     No one would admit it. Would you? Would you admit that your thought process was so easily manipulated that you would actually spend your hard-earned money on something you saw on TV for thirty seconds or read about in the latest issue of People?

     I can only think of one exception to this: people who actually work in advertising. We’d be the first to say, “Yeah. I totally bought these new adidas because the ‘Jose +10’ campaign was so freaking cool.” Other than us? Nobody.

     Again: advertising is not science. If no one will tell you that they based a decision on an ad, there’s no way to directly correlate a brand campaign to ROI. You can take all of the peripheral data and information and run all of the algorithms you want, but it still becomes guesswork. It’s a very expensive best guess. And in a down economy you don’t have the money to spend on advertising, much less black box research.

     So when your CFO asks you to prove the return on the company’s investment, tell her there’s only one way to do that. Tell her you’re going to stop advertising. Kaput. No more. Tell her it’s the only way to show the correlation between your job and the company’s stability or growth.

     I bet you get your budget back.