Every so often I hear about a company engaging in the type of online marketing I believe is the future of our field. This is one of those occasions: Kimberly-Clark (parent company for big brands like Kleenex, Kotex, Cottonelle, and Huggies) increased their investment in so-called Programmatic Performance media in 2012 – But the exciting part is they did so as part of a larger initiative.

This is where it gets interesting: according to the media operations head, "2012 was proof positive of the benefits [Programmatic offers] in both driving efficiency and quality…One of the first goals was to simply establish the structure to mine our own data, mold it with outside data, and optimize in real time. We’re now set up for addressing upper or lower funnel goals depending on Commercial Program objectives."

This means that KC  started with a focus on efficiency like most brands looking to online marketing, and now they're interested in growth. But in order to go down that road, they had to install a framework that could evaluate performance of both Branding and DR media.

I'm excited about this because this is what MakeBuzz does; using our software, we establish frameworks for evaluating and optimizing media along the entire Customer Journey – and we do it by measuring media performance, most importantly, against overall business metrics. Our end goal isn't efficient media, it's business growth and profitability.

It sounds like KC is inline with this thinking and I'll be very interested to see how their framework operates, and if their process is similar to ours. In the meantime however, I'll settle for the knowledge that others see the incredible value such a framework offers.

I was looking over this infographic on Google's Revenue from Search/Display Advertising and was surprised to see such a high Click-through-rate for Search.

To me, this means that advertisers are still using Search as Direct-Response media only, shortchanging not just Google but more importantly, themselves. Using Search to address the entire Customer Journey - and accepting slightly lower CTR for more Awareness Phase media, in exchange for a larger volume of Impressions (Reach), not to mention overall sales, would make much better business sense for most brands.

On the other side, I see a disconnect between Display and the Creative used. A CTR that low means  the messaging is too direct-response focused while the venue is geared more towards Branding.

In both instances the medium is being under-leveraged. Take a look below-- What do you think?

I've sat in my fair share of online marketing meetings and I'm always surprised how, even at the higher levels, the conversation tends to pivot around ROI. I'm not saying that it has no value, it's just not the best metric to judge the success a marketing campaign (let alone a business).

You would think that the primary goal would be to maximize the volume of profit not the ratio of sales to spend – Find the optimal amount reach and spend for the most amount of sales.

But I keep getting reminded of how far we've not come as an industry when I see these types of graphs leading on "Global Marketing Reports".

It's 2012 and we're still starting big discussion with talk of ROI – a measure of efficiency, not growth.

Search Marketing Trends in US, UK, & Germany_{(as reported in Q2 2012 Global Digital Advertising Update, Adobe Digital Index)}

I remember of my work at a major airline several years ago when the company was basically wasting their online efforts by focusing on efficiency instead of growth potential.

They were pushing for a 100:1 ROI of online media to online ticket sales, which meant they could only afford to spend $2.50 to acquire a customer. Ridiculous, when we realized that travel consolidators like Expedia were paying more to sell the airline's flights!

We managed to gain their trust by testing our way into cities with our method based on Cost Volume Profit analysis. We demonstrated quickly how an increase in Customer Acquisition Cost— an effective decrease in ROI –could actually grow profits.

By scaling this strategy, we helped them increase revenues from online ticket sales by 4.5X in less than 2 years. Today, online sales represent over half of their business – the profitable half.

When are other businesses going to wake up to the realization that profit volume is the metric that matters, sometimes at the expense of ROI?