Feel the Power
There’s a scene in the Charlie Chaplin flick Modern Times where Chaplin, playing the working stiff in a massive production plant, races along an assembly line. He queues up components, tightens connections and tosses out inferior parts. The classic moment, of course, is when he loses his concentration — for just a moment — and gets sucked into the processing machine.
Here at PROMO, we’ve been on guard to stay focused as we live our own version of Modern Times. Our components, however, are research data, and our product is the 2004 Industry Trends Report, included in this issue. For months, we’ve polled, tabulated, reported, questioned and weighed the responses of hundreds of brand and agency executives. You can read the results of this work in the special section that begins right after p. 26.
Add to this data stream our brand-new initiative: research into the many facets of entertainment marketing. While Hollywood has always been a great source of borrowed glamour for a wide variety of brands, we’re drilling below the glitz to get to the numerical underpinnings of tie-ins, sponsorships, licensing and more. Look for our findings in next month’s issue.
Why this unrelenting chase of the numbers? Certainly not because they are easy to turn up. For all their interest in quantifiable results, brand marketers are notoriously shy of revealing any of their own data. And their agency partners know they may burn a client relationship if they hint to clearly about how well (or poorly) a given campaign pulled. But we keep asking, because our readers keep asking. We all understand that if knowledge is power, then data is where that power begins. That’s why spending on promotional marketing and other ROI-quantifiable disciplines has continued to grow, while less-tangible media advertising loses its predominance.
Unfortunately, there are occasions when knowledge is used destructively. In our cover story (p. 23), reporter Karen Holt takes a look at the Internet’s role in helping coupon cheats proliferate fraud techniques for counterfeiting in both print and online formats. Retailers, marketers, manufacturers and system providers are beginning to wake up to the extent of the crime. We hope this piece will empower you to protect your investment, should couponing be one of your brand tactics.
As always, tell us what you think. And if that opinion should happen to include a few statistical reference points, we’re especially eager to hear from you!
