Richard Grammier of the Jet Propulsion Laboratory is a decorated hero of American space exploration; many NASA missions owe their success in part to his dedicated project management. His latest project, called Deep Impact, was extremely complex: its goal was to fire two space probes 83 million miles into space to intercept a comet – one probe to hit the comet hard, creating a deep impact (hence the name); the second probe to fly by the comet, observe the impact and collect science data to determine the chemical composition of the materials excavated by the impact.

Grammier described the challenge of this project as “shooting a flying bullet at another flying bullet, while having a third flying bullet observe the impact and collect science data.” It was no easy feat, to be sure.

Moreover, Grammier inherited a mess of a project. He summarized his management challenges in terms of the following four fundamental problems:

1. Rigorous processes either not understood or not followed.

2. Inability to perform a project validation and verification programme.

3. Incomplete or insufficient project process reporting.

4. Inadequate flight operations concept and contingency plans.

Marketers attending a conference at which Mr Grammier spoke were asked to consider whether they had faced these four problems in recent marketing campaigns. The answer was Yes, even for some of the best marketers in the world.

Now, you might be thinking that, for a project like Deep Impact, of courseextensive process and measurement need to be central to the way things are done. After all, there’s a lot of money at stake and a very narrow window to get it right; otherwise it might be years and years before another opportunity presents itself.

You know the old saying that half of your advertising is wasted (but you don’t know which half)? Well, turns out that only around 37% of your advertising is trash. Sadly, that does equate to quite a lot of money – US$112 billion out of a total annual adspend of around $300 billion.

That happy statistic (and the tale above) come from the recently-published treatise “What Sticks: Why Most Advertising Fails And How to Guarantee Yours Succeeds” by Rex Briggs and Greg Stuart. Here’s how these two cheer-germs introduce the topic:

“Marketing is failing. CEOs sense it; top marketers know it; and our research proves it. That’s a strong statement – but we can back it up, from our experience and our research.

“We’ve conducted extensive research over the past 5 years, with over 30 major marketers – blue-chip companies such as Ford, ESPN, Procter & Gamble, Colgate, Kraft Foods, VeriSign, Johnson & Johnson, Volkswagen and Philips, to name just a few. They hired us to measure the impact of more than $1 billion in advertising spending in a revolutionary new way that shone a light on some very serious problems & opportunities.”

“What Sticks” has as its goal to help marketing and advertising professionals understand and improve marketing productivity through the use of new approaches, new thinking, some science and quite a few ideas based on what they’ve learned from their research with leading marketing departments in Fortune 200 companies.

Along the way, they also show us how to apply a little rocket-science thinking to marketing, inspired by the way that Richard Grammier addressed his four problems on the Deep Impact project:

1. First, Richard ensured that his team understood and was working with the proper process. The authors outline a marketing equivalent, a Communications Optimization Process, which (as with NASA) can make the difference between success and failure.

2. Next, Grammier and his team fixed the inability to perform adequate validation and verification tests. For marketers, this translates to testing different consumer motivations or alternative advertising messages to see which works better, or testing different consumer targeting strategies or different media mixes.

3. As with Deep Impact, marketing needs to fix its measurement and data reporting in order to provide a clear overall picture of the success of individual marketing elements.

4. And finally, Grammier addressed the inadequate flight operations concept and contingency plans in the same way that marketers will need to follow: develop a clear definition of success and what actions to take if certain elements of the campaign are off base (scenario planning).

If you can’t find it in your local bookstore, you can order “What Sticks” by following this link to Amazon.

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