Behind the scenes of any good web site implementation is a solid marriage between Marketing and IT. There’s really no playbook here, every company seems to have a little different process for how the two departments should work together and it’s really interesting how the interactions between the two have a lot of similarities to a real world marriage.

Let’s not kid ourselves; every marriage has issues, the ones that last for a long time just figure out how to make the best out of the ups and downs. The ones that don’t, move on and start the process all over again. I actually got married when I was 19 and divorced at 24, we were just too young. I remarried when I was 40 and we are still going strong. Now my parents, they have been married for over fifty years.

I think the things that make a good marriage can be found in similar beliefs, goals and a genuine friendship for one another. Some people say that couples that last a long time have a lot in common, others say that opposites attract; in either case, there needs to be mutual respect from both parties in the relationship.

In business, vendors often work with only one side of their client’s house and it sometimes feels like there is a “don’t ask don’t tell” policy in affect. Many companies, as odd as it might sound, actually utilize vendor services because they can remain “under the radar” for some period of time.

The Marketing folks think that IT doesn’t understand their business goals and the IT folks think that Marketing doesn’t have any long-term technology vision. Well, I can tell you from personal experience that this can put the vendor in a rather precarious position.

In a real world marriage, this sort of extracurricular relationship seems to begin in a similar way. You can easily imagine someone confiding with a friend on how their spouse doesn’t “understand their needs”. This innocent discussion could progress into a relationship when the acquaintance tries to help out their friend. Eventually, the outside faction is exposed and often made out to be a rogue charlatan.

To avoid this sort of situation in business, I guess the vendor could insist that their activities be fully disclosed to all other parties in their client’s company, but can this really up to the vendor? In many cases, to win the business the vendor needs to present assets not currently available from inside the prospective company and that might directly compete with other parties involved.

This brings me back to the marriage metaphor. My observation is that good chemistry between Marketing and IT is rare and the exception, not the rule; afterall, the relationship isn’t built upon the same underlying principles as a real world marriage. Still, it may be said that “Marketing is from Venus and IT is from Mars” or vice versa of course.

Obviously, it is important for Marketing and IT to have clear communication paths, but sometimes the biggest problems are solved by the most minute details. This morning I got up and ask my wife to be my Valentine and I can tell you that even with all life’s ups-and-downs this small gesture confirmed that we are in our marriage together.

Recently, we were asked to look into the best ways of displaying mathematical symbols and formulas in a WordPress blog posting. The author was having trouble generating all the necessary elements for their post using the available functionality in WordPress so they ask us to look into the options and provided us with an article formatted as a Microsoft Word document.

At first, we tried to use the Microsoft Word document. We started with a simple cut and paste from Word to WordPress. This has always been unpredictable and this time around was certainly no exception. Converting the file to a standard text file worked better, but we lost the special characters and formatting in the process.

Next, we tried saving the Word file as HTML, but then we were presented with the challenge of sifting through an enormous amount of extraneous code and files for input into WordPress. This was frustrating because our formulas were converted to a series of files and images that didn’t display as they did in Word.

A simple search on the phrase “displaying mathematical formulas using HTML” will give you all the links needed to get the background on this topic. At some point, you’ll find that TeX is semantically superior to HTML and that LaTeX is widely used in the scientific community for blog postings similar to ours.

Installing LaTeX in WordPress was not easy. There are a lot of steps, the files are big and it takes time. It’s also important to have the latest version of WordPress running since we ran into issues moving our installation from our development environment to our client’s production server without synchronizing our WordPress versions.

In our WordPress post there were various symbols that could be addressed with character entity reference (i.e. the Greek small letter mu (μ) has a character reference of (ampersand-mu-semicolon) in HTML 4.0). Several parameters were subscript and superscript, but it was simple to nest the character entity references in the HTML tags as needed, but for the more complex equations we needed to enhance basic HTML functionality with LaTeX.

Here’s one of the equations from the blog post:

Here’s the TeX code for the equation in the post:
$latex \displaystyle S_q = \sqrt{\frac{1}{MN} \sum_{k=0}^{M-1} \sum_{l=0}^{N-1} [z(x_k,y_l)-\mu]^2} $

Here’s a link to the final post:
http://nano.tm.agilent.com/blog/2008/02/04/rms-roughness-the-measurement-that-may-sometimes-be-skewed/

For us, LaTeX worked great. It is ideal for WordPress authors that deal with mathematical formulas and don’t want to be bothered with the tedious tasks associated with generating HTML and images to support their postings.

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I suppose it doesn’t surprise me that a recent report noted that marketing effectiveness is now at an all-time low. According to the World Advertising Research Center “…The marketers surveyed said that 65% of their marketing spend had no discernible effect on consumers in 2007.” However, it goes on to say, “The report suggests the main cause of the waste can be largely attributed to lack of measurement…”

“Media clutter, sophisticated consumers and intense competition go some way to explain the wastage…(but) tracking every marketing dollar spent would mitigate the effect and feed critical real time analysis back into marketing strategies” it went on to say.

They covered a lot of ground here. Let’s examine how multiple channels, time and measurement play into the situation.

If the statement “no discernible effect on consumers” is true, how would they know if as they say they have not sufficiently been able to measure it? That’s been the core problem for marketers since the Stone Age; understanding what marketing actions cause a direct reaction. (And to further complicate things, there are various intended reactions - not all of them are outright purchases).

It is rare that one message delivered through one media will bring about an immediate consumer action. Short of a Super Bowl ad or a guy handing out flyers for lunch coupons on 6th Avenue in Manhattan at lunchtime, it’s going to be difficult to understand how an ad (or any single marketing driver) specifically affects behavior.

“Traditional” media has wrestled with this conundrum for decades. Magazines and newspapers relied on circulation figures, which were extremely general. They assumed readers saw the ads, but without some sort of tie-back (coupon, 800 number and the like), you really didn’t know if any eyeballs saw your ad. For that matter, they factored-in a “pass-along” percentage which estimated how many other eyeballs saw the magazine after the original reader passed it on. In other words, it was not necessarily a true reflection of who else saw the magazine and, hence, the ad.

Television was (and is) still wrapped up in estimates. The early days “diaries” (written accounts done by the honor system) drew from a representative sample of the viewing universe to jot down what they watched. Researchers made the assumption that whoever watched the show also watched the commercials. Radio measurement? Don’t even go there.

Things took a change for the better when the Internet held out the promise of being able to track the effectiveness of all online marketing efforts; and to a large degree it can. Specific tags and other mechanisms can be placed on virtually all online marketing drivers and followed through the path to online purchase (and in some cases telephone or coupon purchases). However, all the stars have to align just perfectly for that to happen. First, the company’s privacy policy has to allow such tracking if the sale consummates online and customer information is given. Secondly, a marketing message (driver), a purchase decision, and an actual transaction have to occur in a relatively short period of time. There are many and varied reasons for this, such as expired browser “sessions” and/or “cookies,” etc. Additionally, toll-free call centers have to be able to correlate incoming calls directly back to a driver (sometimes it can be a unique offer code), but that relies on the caller forwarding the code, when possible.

But for the moment, let’s assume that the Internet is the most measurable medium we have in terms of cause-and-effect. Many firms have made a solid business of connecting-the-dots between a paid placement campaign on GOOGLE, or a banner ad in a syndication network, and traffic to an online store. However, I submit that most marketing analysts are assuming that one driver equals one sale. That is, you see an ad somewhere, then make a purchase based on that message. Unfortunately that does not occur in real life. Often, marketing is the accumulation of messages that, once a need arises, a purchase decision is made and completed.

With today’s overwhelming collection of media channels, you can imagine how difficult, if not impossible it is to follow each and every marketing driver toward an ROI. Let’s look at an example:

A computer software manufacturer holds a seminar at a conference center that lets prospective customers “test drive” their product. Prospective clients learn about this seminar via a combination of direct mail, banner ads, and eMail blasts that the company has planned for in advance. Once at the seminar, users who like the software are given a coupon for a “seminar discount” to purchase a copy either at a local reseller, via toll-free 800 call center, or on the Web. The coupon is good for 90 days.

Can you spot the measurement dilemma? Which marketing “driver” would you say caused the purchase? The coupon they handed out at the seminar? If that was the case, the coupon would get all the credit and the ROI for the seminar would literally be zero. Same can be said for the banner ad or the eMail blast. How would you calculate and ROI if the user held-off cashing it in for 60 days? What would be optimal is a weighting of the relative importance of each driver (for that specific interaction), in combination with the duration between first exposure and purchase. Remember, time plays an important part here too. How?

Take big ticket purchases. I won’t run out and buy a car solely because I see a banner ad or a television commercial. As a consumer I must have a need (my current vehicle is old, ugly or unreliable), and a motivation (price, sales or rebates). Unless I’m Malcom Forbes I probably won’t buy a car on a whim. So it stands to reason that Honda can run all the banner ads or direct mail it wants to; but I won’t buy until I have a need and motivation. So, does it follow that all the marketing efforts Honda throws at me goes to waste? I think not. If those messages have convinced me that Honda is the brand I should choose, then when I’m ready to buy I’ll buy Honda. Can you track the ROI? I cannot.

In a perfect world you would follow each and every marketing effort and its contribution to the intended goal. But since such measurement is still difficult to track and hard to determine, it is no wonder that marketing executives don’t understand what the real problem is, and believe that some of their efforts have no discernible effect.

Agree? Disagree? Have a success story? Have a question? Share it with me at: bob_chernet@viewmark.com

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© 2008 Bob Chernet
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