In the new era of accountability responsibility and state-authorised bonuses everyone is trying to measure everything.

Most of the time, this is a justification of activity, inactivity, existence or jobs. But in the world of advertising, we need to be particularly careful what we measure. As the saying goes, we know that only half of our advertising is working - we just don’t know which half.

Online marketing has the beauty of being 100% measurable - or so we are led to believe. The use of cookies and pixels enables us to track who has seen our ad and what they did after it. And all this is beautifully packaged as “analytics” - a lovely word implying science and absolutes.

But online analytics don’t tell us as much as we think they do. Is it enough to know how many people viewed an ad? What about how people think and feel? How do you measure the whole experience?

Measurement v money

With media budgets shrinking across the board, it has become even more important to justify every penny spent. And so it seems strange that marketers are still so attached to one-dimensional metrics when they really need to know as much as they can.

We’ve taken an overview of advertising measurement - both on- and off-line - in our whitepaper: Finding Out Which Half Of Your Advertising Is Working. Please feel free to download it here - and leave a comment or get in touch if you want to continue the discussion or find out more.

I've just been looking through two sets of brand guidelines, both for household-name b2b brands. They are nice, shiny, well produced documents. Look great in print. But I'm looking for guidance on how we use the brands for online projects we're planning.

What we need to know - and I think should reasonably expect of proper, complete, fully-rounded brand guidelines - is how the brands should live in the online environment.

And nope, there's nothing there. It's completely absent. It doesn't appear seem to have been considered at all. They aren't even that old - the last one was produced in 2008.

So I've come to the conclusion that most of what these 'guidelines' contain is a now total irrelevance to the way a brand needs to be used now.

If you haven't seen the WWF (wildlife, not wrestling) ad that was created by DDB Brazil, see it below (quickly, before they take the link down).

For the record, everyone responsible has been quick to apologise for it. But whilst we can see that many people are understandably sensitive about the 9/11 reference, we can't help wondering if an issue as big as environmental responsibility doesn't deserve a big, hard-hitting bit of publicity...

And of course, a good piece of creative is one that's gets people talking, isn't it?

What do you think?

Yes - your B2B brand can be stronger, fitter and altogether more gorgeous. And it takes just a few minutes. Allow me to explain and invite you all to join in an experiment.

A few weeks ago I wrote a blog post that postulated the three fundamental questions that a B2B company needed to answer if it was to succeed in social media.

I chatted to a few people about this afterwards and we thought that distilling complex issues down to a few basic questions was incredibly liberating. Forget the detail, just look at the topline. So why not apply the same principle to the issue of assessing your brand strength?

I believe there are just ten questions you need to ask in order to get a top-level idea of how strong your brand is (or your client's brand). Naturally, I'm ignoring the details here - but then that's where the devil is - so this is not the basis for a five-year branding strategy. But just ten questions should give you a revealing snapshot of your brand fitness, and highlight the areas you need to work on - thus giving you an opportunity to make your brand stronger.

But what are the ten key questions? And how can you do this in 3 minutes?

Sometimes, it’s good to return to the basics.

I have been looking for a way to distil the essence of social media marketing for B2B and, over the course of a number of conversations with clients, it has become clear that there are just 3 things a B2B organisation needs if it is going to have a strong, useful presence on the social web.

Yep. Just three.

The simple (or simplified) truth is that if you can answer ‘Yes’ to the following three questions, you will make a success out of social media marketing…

Well actually, I didn’t. The envelope asked the question “Does digital spell the end for the letter?” I opened the envelope to find there was no letter inside, just an invitation to join the debate on Twitter. I’ve no idea if digital spells the end for the letter. I have some views, but the point this makes is that the “good idea” remains one of the most powerful factors in marketing. We can discuss the merits of the medium, but the thought behind it is what usually matters. The “no letter” trick was perhaps pretty obvious, but it worked and that’s good marketing for me.

A short post, but it’s best to keep things simple, isn’t it?

There are many things in life that can ruin the mood. Caterpillars in the salad. Wasps in the bedroom. Spotify ads in the middle of my Sounds of Nature playlist.
But nothing dampens my enthusiasm while I’m browsing the web quite as drastically as the dreaded data capture form. It just changes the mood completely.

I refer to the kind of situation where you find a link to an interesting-sounding article, but you are not allowed to see it until you have told them your age, sex and inside leg measurement. It says to me: we were having so much fun, sharing information in a nice friendly way, and then suddenly you had to drop this on me. It’s like a bucket of cold water. So why do so many B2B marketers do it? Here are some of the reasons why they do - and why they shouldn’t.

Right now, B2B media owners have got it tough. No point pretending otherwise.  Ad revenue is down, publications are suffering, and many ad sales people are fearing for their jobs.

Luckily for you, you are probably not a media owner. But as a B2B marketer, you have your own problems and getting the most out of your (shrinking) budgets isn't easy. There are opportunities for media buyers - you just have to look closely...

Someone once described social media as ‘the biggest cocktail party in the world’. For me, this description tells us less about what it is and more how we should all behave once we’re there. Having seen the subject of etiquette spring up time and time again recently online, I thought it was maybe time for a quick summary. Follow these dos and don’ts and you will be the belle of the ball. Ignore the etiquette and no one will talk to you. Here are the 6 golden rules…