Metrics - look who's riding the pendulum now

Once, a long long long time ago, I worked at Citigroup. Honest, I did. And at Citigroup, 'metric' is a verb. Everything that happened, or that thought about happening, or that might happen, had to be measured, analyzed and reported. The trick was - once the data was sliced and diced and served on a silver platter, then what, pardon the word choice, happened? In the wise words of my very wise boss, we promptly and with gusto threw all that data on the floor, walked on it and stomped it into the ground. Hmmph.

But I did say that my boss (let's call her V) was very wise, and so she assembled a crack team (including yours truly) to develop a system not only to investigate and measure data, but to display that data in a friendly and supremely usable way. She developed a dashboard for executives that looked like the controls on a cockpit (just imagine all those suits with their own custom cockpit for their business units - they were in heaven!) and that functioned proactively. Let me repeat - the cockpit had its very own brain. This was more years ago than I'd like to cop to - but it was bleeding edge back then, and it's not all that commonplace now.

Why am I posting this history lesson? Well, everywhere we turn today, it's all about marketing metrics, and click counting, and data delivery. But T and I were at lunch yesterday, discussing the thought that although programs are reporting more metrics, and are counting every click every which way, our clients still are not in that much better of a position or more prepared to act on that data. Countless times we have delivered a database of qualified, enthusiastic and interested consumers to a client - only to have them say thank you and, metaphorically anyway, put it away on a shelf to gather dust. What is the post-activity activity? Who follows up on those addresses and emails and opt-ins and opt-outs? Who turns interested consumers into loyal customers?

Metrics are great, and they're certainly a huge step forward from the black hole of marketing (does this sound familiar? "I know that 50% of my advertising is wasted. I just don't know which half"), but they can also be just another safety belt. Just as you won't get fired for hiring IBM, you can rely on today's metrics to cushion your decisions ("but we saw an 80% click-through rate!"). The key really isn't the metrics, folks, but, as V, my very wise boss, realized oh those many moons ago, it's the action you take because of the metrics. All those suits may have had access to the data, in dry-as-dust 10" thick greenbar reports - but until V provided a simple (and fun, suits are people too) interface that not only reported the data, but more importantly, facilitated action based on the data (at the push of a button, minatory emails could be sent, limts could be changed, vendors could be challenged), no one was leveraging the data.

Marketing programs are no different. Metrics are great - but the best programs are the ones that take the metrics in stride and come complete with post-activity activity. 80% of your audience clicked through where you wanted them to? Fabulous! But in our view, only if the program continues to produce consumer activity (measurable to be sure: how many of them went on to sign up for that special promotion, how many of those resulted in a sale) is the program truly complete. Because, to murder the bard, the sale is the thing.