How do you hit a long-term goal with a short-term hammer?
Opinion
Following the launch of dentsu’s Brand Reset project, Lumen’s Mike Follett asks why short-termism persists and looks at how the agency is embedding long-term thinking into its planning.
WC Sellar and RJ Yeatman’s 1066 And All That is the funniest history book ever written. In fact, it may be the funniest book ever written. It describes itself as a ‘Memorable History of England, comprising all the parts you can remember, including 103 Good Things, 5 Bad Kings and 2 Genuine Dates’.
History, the authors tell us, ‘is not what you thought. It is what you can remember. All other history defeats itself.’
It then proceeds to regurgitate all the half-remembered bits of our island story that a partially educated Brit of the 1920s could be expected to remember, ending abruptly at the end of the First World War, when ‘America was thus clearly the top nation, and History came to a .’ This is deemed a bad thing.
Within our little world of marketing, short-termism is a bad thing.
Brands – or platforms – that focus on the short-term results might be efficient but are rarely thought to be effective. Not for them the majestic sweep of the ad campaigns of yore, that melt the stony heart or persuade the sceptical head. They may be here today, but they are gone tomorrow. In short, they are not memorable.
But if advertising is all about laying down ‘long-term memory structures’ that can be ‘activated’ at the ‘point of purchase’, why do we invest so much money in short-term campaigns?
We’re getting on for the quindecennial anniversary of Binet and Field’s The Long and the Short of It. Have we learned nothing in the last 15 years?
Why does short-termist thinking persist?
Many reasons are proffered for the prevalence of short-termist thinking. Some point to the ubiquity of short-term metrics, which ‘crowd out’ long-term learning. Others say it’s down to the allegedly short-term horizons of modern marketing directors, satisfied with a superficial sales blip before they jump into their new role.
Most ominously, there are prophets of doom who question the value of long-term brand building in an increasingly unpredictable world. Why invest in the future when we know not what the future holds?
I am sure that there is truth to all these conjectures, but I would like to offer an additional reason for short-termist thinking. And in the process of addressing this issue, I suggest that we have some reasons for long-term optimism.
Agency planners, especially those doing their f-cking jobs, use media planning tools to understand the relative value of different media inventory. Within these tools, you can estimate the reach, frequency, and attention you can expect from different media investments, and weigh one against the other.
The best of these tools go one step further, estimating the impact these investments are likely to have.
Dentsu’s Effective Attention model, for instance, uses everything the agency knows about how attention converts into memory across different channels and formats to help its teams plan and buy based on short-term shifts in awareness and brand choice.
But here we have our problem. Even dentsu, which has the most sophisticated attention+outcomes toolkit in the market, is optimising for short-term outcomes.
Man first shapes his tools, and then his tools shape him
It is therefore a good thing that dentsu has decided to reshape its tools. Launched this week, the dentsu Brand Reset project shows how to embed long-term thinking into the agency’s planning systems.
Working with Lumen Research and Kantar, dentsu has undertaken an ambitious project to understand how attention to video advertising across a wide variety of media channels – from linear and CTV to social media to quality publishing – converts into long-term memory structures.
55,000 respondent sessions and interviews later, we can now augment what we know about how much attention is required to drive a short-term impact with what is needed to drive long-term results.
As Les Binet has said on reviewing the data, “The Brand Reset has legitimised long-term brand building in digital video. It gives planners a coherent way to think about modern video effects and reopens an important industry conversation about long-term value.”
But not just a way to think, but also a way to act. Because the attention thresholds for the short-term impact were built into Dentsu’s planning tools, its planners can now set thresholds for long-term memory. It’s not either short-termist or long-termist but bothist by default.
There is hope here – to move beyond the silly shorthand of ‘Long Term = Good Thing vs Short Term = Bad Thing’ and instead do the Right Thing for clients and consumers.
Embedding this insight into the tools we use is key to driving the change that we all want to be remembered for.
Mike Follett is the founder and CEO of Lumen Research.