Up until now, companies have had to make do with mediocre, lacklustre measurement tools with which to measure and quantify the efficacy of their advertising spend. Lengthy, costly interviews; surveys and various other mechanisms for extricating information from the public are often employed. Yet the real, numeric value of the advertising spend is still not accurately determined for the business or media agency.
Ask yourself: How effective is your campaign REALLY? How “worth it” was that massive chunk of budget you just allocated to that national radio campaign that ended with a bit of a fizzle? What did the Double-Page-Spread (DPS) you placed in that fancy glossy mean for your bottom-line? What about those flyers you printed as inserts for the regional publications in Mpumalanga?
These are questions that the marketing industry, business owners and entrepreneurs grapple with on a daily basis. How do you accurately measure the ROI on your advertising spend in traditional media?
The answer to this question has finally arrived, in the form of MBTS the brainchild of seasoned business veteran Francesco Mariola.
As the founding member of cellular retailer GloCell, Mariola was responsible for buying and placing his own media. “I soon realised that different media types produced vastly different sales results, impacting heavily in other areas such as stock, distribution and cash flow.”
The culmination of over seven years of intense product development and research with some extremely impressive credentials to its name already, MBTS is not to be scoffed at in its ability to answer the most elusive question.
MBTS is able to clearly track the individual effectiveness of all media, even when performed all at once and across any medium. Drilling down, stats are available by specific programme, time slot and genre, clearly defining performers and non-performers. This quantitative system tracks results by region, store, product and category and strategically – even measuring the effects of competitor activity.
Making use of sophisticated formulae and algorithms, the globally patented, multi-user, web-based MBTS platform provides all departments within an organisation with concurrent access to performance information on all marketing activities. This, of course, enables informed business decisions to be made based on accurate performance data. It’s as if all the measurability of the online world has now been unleashed and made accessible for offline campaigns with a powerful tool that ties it all together in a neat, tidy package.
The system has been tested and refined in demanding retail, chain store and cellular environments. KPMG was consulted in the development of the system to ensure reliable best-practise methodologies were employed.
MBTS has a management team that reads like an all-star line-up including: Former MD of Red Nail and Two Tone André Hübner; Luisa Belter, ex-MD of MindShare and head of Telmar – Western Europe; leading international physicist and mathematician Dr Frans Venter and former Absa chief economist Christo Luüs.
MBTS is poised to initiate a massive shake-up of the media, marketing and advertising industry. With time and as the system is used across various mediums and campaigns, its potential to make intelligent campaign recommendations based on budget, product category, industry/sector and historical performance will see MBTS rapidly earning its keep and become an integral part in the marketing intelligence armoury of most progressive companies.
While there appears to be enormous potential for the system as a tool with which to harness advertising budgets and ensure maximum return on your advertising spend, we’re waiting to see if it catches on. It may well be met with some institutional resistance by the old guard, as is often the case with most technological quantum leaps. It will be interesting to see how MBTS alters the media landscape and the ad agency/client relationship – and how it will ultimately impact on campaign expenditure. What is certain is that the MBTS system represents some bold new thinking on what is essentially a global problem.
