Fopsha asked Neil Campbell on his thoughts on marketing measurement and the biggest attribution challenges faced by attribution.

Isobel: One of the traditional complaints about marketing is that it isn't always aligned to business metrics and results. So performance marketing and e-commerce has obviously gone a long way to kind of address that. But the relationship with the CEO and the CFO is still a common difficult point. What measures do you implement to make sure that you have a great relationship with the CEO and the CFO?

Neil: Yeah, it's really interesting question. So I have a great relationship with our two Nick and our CFO Lee because they're very bought into kind of what we're doing and, you know, what the aims of kind of growth are. And the other thing is to add is that, you know, there is a sort of let me not quite dividing line, but there is especially in the kind of growth world, there is sort of performance marketing one side and then there's the kind of creative kind of brand side on the other.

And on what you sort of find is that especially in kind of start-ups and especially in the kind of performance marketing side, there's a lot of numbers and technically kind of operating off a kind of platform and things like that. But it still needs the kind of creative input because ultimately what makes kind of ads work is that if you don't have the creative, then it doesn't work.

Especially important in a kind of TikTok world when you've got sort of got to grab people's attention instantly and things. But generally what I find is that at the start of a start-up kind of life and kind of in the early stages, the cash is very tight and there are for every money you can spend, has to get an instant kind of return.

And therefore you gravitate towards channels like this because like I've spent you know, £1,000 in a day. How many customers do they get? I know my CPA by the end of the day, I know if it's working or not. And that's the kind of stuff that, you know, CFO and things can get behind. This is like, OK, we know exactly where we are, we know where we are versus the kind of goals and some of the things you have to kind of coach them through when you do that.

Is that the first version of an ad? It'll always get better because we can always optimise. So we, you know, we worked a rule of thumb on a new channel or something that we can probably cut the CPA by half or a third just for the creative testing and working out what works for that audience. So you've got to get them on side of that.

It's like - you find an instant answer but it's, it's a number that we can bring down. Then as you kind of scale up, you start to kind of run out of road on how far performance marketing can take you and some of the saturation that you get within a channel. And at that point you're starting to say, well, I'm going to start doing channels which maybe don't have the same instant payback.

So maybe I'm not going to find out if that's worked. You know, if we do partnership activity, the investment there is to hire someone to go and do deals. But then I don't find out if they've worked until three or four months down the line when it's got them all kind of set up. Similarly, when you kind of get into brand marketing activity and that's where you sort of obviously get a lot more into the creative side of things at that point, you really have to go, well, that's a lot of money to spend on.

The only way to do it is to spend a lot of money. So the question then becomes, well, how do we make sure that that's the right decision? It's more likely to work on? So we do that on kind of test and learn philosophy. How do we test out those either regionally or in kind of small places that can start to really kind of work right where the challenge is really to kind of go, I have to design a test, but I have to design a test that's actually going to give me an answer.

Am I supposed to spend too little money and not really know? 

 Isobel: Yeah, and I guess that's the hard part, is not getting people on board with the kind of tests that you're doing to make sure that they're agreeing. The kind of success metrics. That means that it's been a good decision at the end. And I guess kind of building on that.