Honestly evaluating your work

Here's an interesting Q&A with a chief marketing officer from Yahoo. I think she brings up some interesting points that we should all keep at the top of mind as we evaluate the return on investment, effectiveness of our work, reach of our plans, goals and call to action.

Below I've pasted the first few questions from the interview, but you can read the entire article here.

paidContent: How did the first phase of the campaign perform?

Elisa Steele: It was planned to get Yahoo back in the conversation. In the U.S., we were on a multi-year downward trend on brand-health metrics, particularly “Likely to recommend.” We’ve been monitoring those health metrics since the launch of the campaign and for the first time in a number of years those metrics have stabilized for Yahoo so we’re pleased with the performance of the campaign.

It was not designed for an increase in traffic. There are many outside publications that are evaluating it on that.

Looking back, is there anything you would have changed?
The video we played on broadcast. It was highly likeable. Consumers really liked the video. We didn’t do as well with, ‘So Yahoo, now what do you want me to do?’ What was the specific call to action in that spot? So they highly liked it but we didn’t give them enough call to action. So that’s one thing we’ll definitely do better this time.

How will you be measuring the effectiveness of the new phase?
We’re not abandoning brand-health metrics because it’s not good enough to stabilize. We need to actually move up and to the right. In addition to that, because this campaign is far more social, far more experiential, we’re going to be looking for feedback from consumers on how much more willing they are to try Yahoo products and in fact (whether) they actually do—(the) download of new apps that we put into the market, (the) time spent on the Yahoo network.

We’re not looking to increase new (unique users). People like to measure us on that and they probably will but that’s not what the campaign is designed for. It’s designed more to help current Yahoo users to find more experiences on Yahoo that they want to test and trial.

Read the entire article here