Justifying spend on social media “a battle” says Kraft’s digital head
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Kraft’s top UK digital marketer Sonia Carter says she has “to battle” to prove the value of social media to senior executives, despite a series of successful campaigns.
Speaking at the Marketing Week 1-2-1 Digital Strategy Summit in London today (10 August), Carter said that the company’s legacy at creating “strong” campaigns using traditional media, means that digital is often overlooked when it comes to the allocation of marketing budgets.
She added: “There is a battle to push digital to the agenda in the company, which is so strong on TV, even though we have a pretty active social media programme.”
Kraft, which owns Cadbury, has focused much of its social media activity in recent months around its Spots v Stripes London 2012 Olympics campaign.
The campaign has been criticised by commentators, with some questioning its effectiveness, although independent research from Hall & Partners claims Cadbury has moved into the top 4% of brands in the UK in terms of engagement, from the top 12%, since the launch of the activity.
Carter said her team’s future focus will be to investigate how to gain commercial return from Kraft’s social media campaigns, in order to demonstrate their true value to the company.
She added: “I’m surprised and disappointed that nobody has cracked exactly how you demonstrate return from social media yet. It will be several months, if not longer, until a universal way of measuring the effectiveness of social media campaigns is found.”
Kraft’s investment in social media will increase as soon as it is possible to demonstrate a “robust ROI”, she said.
Readers' comments (9)
mike fletcher | Wed, 10 Aug 2011 3:44 pm
Since when is 'engagement' the judge of whether a marketing campaign is successful? Did it shift more product or not?
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Eric Saade | Wed, 10 Aug 2011 7:12 pm
According to the article in Marketing "Kraft has defended its Cadbury 'Spots v Stripes' campaign, claiming it has helped the brand hit a five-year market-share high." - result?
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Lara O'Reilly | Wed, 10 Aug 2011 7:14 pm
That's exactly what Sonia Carter is saying, Mike, there's no measurement tool at there at the moment to measure the true ROI of social media campaigns. Almost all the metrics digital marketers have to go on when analysing campaigns are rather vague (as you suggest) and by no means universal.
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mike fletcher | Thu, 11 Aug 2011 10:42 am
@Lara If you can't measure it, why bother doing it? Would love to know what Mr Ritson says!
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Lara O'Reilly | Thu, 11 Aug 2011 12:28 pm
@Mike Because it's important to be where your customers are. It's difficult to measure causation, even with traditional marketing methods, so with social media, even stats like "five-year high market share" are usually more correlation than something that stands up to rigorous examination.
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Gareth | Thu, 11 Aug 2011 1:37 pm
It seems as though the current gap in social media ROI is rapidly rising up the agenda. If a robust measurement doesn't materialise soon, then it shouldn't come as a suprise that in an increasingly tough economic climate it becomes increasingly tough to justify social media marketing spend.
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Elliott Harvey | Tue, 16 Aug 2011 1:38 pm
We have also been finding through speaking with both clients and prospective clients that the majority have been investing into Social Media with little or no expectation of measuring its effectiveness. Companies are content with just being active online with a few more hoping to increase consumer engagement but we’ve seen that, as Sonia says, there just isn’t the ability to accurately measure SM ROI.
It is however possible to align your SM activity so that you support your marketing activities, both BTL and ATL, increasing your overall ROI so it would be madness to stop investing into SM. You need to be realistic in what you want to achieve as it’s not a miracle cure for falling sales and it’s certainly not an alternative to your primary marketing activity. Set out clear objectives which CAN be measured and coincides with campaigns and you WILL get positive feedback which will in turn increase overall ROI. The issue everyone’s having is to what extent?
Therefore you have to constantly analyse and revaluate the results until you have the right mix of content and activity.
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Andy M Turner | Wed, 17 Aug 2011 10:10 pm
At the risk of being accused of over-simplifying things here, is it not the case that measuring success in social media activities begins with being completely clear about the objectives you set and aligning those with some business goals? I’m unfamiliar with Krafts' so-called numerous 'successful campaigns' but wonder by what factors they are judged to be so? If it all stands up to scrutiny, why does anyone need convincing of their value? It should be a no-brainer.
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Adam C | Thu, 25 Aug 2011 11:23 am
Sounds far too much like this... http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=auiczd4OUms
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