The $68 million IBM didn't claim

Some of what a campaign does you can count. Some you can only estimate. Keep the two apart, and work out your return on the part you can count. Here is a case that does it.

In February 2011 an IBM computer called Watson played the American quiz show Jeopardy! against the two finest players the game had seen, and won. IBM sells to businesses, so no consumer was going to buy a Watson. The campaign around the show was there to bring in business buyers. It was later written up as a paper for the IPA Effectiveness Awards and won Silver in 2012. What follows is from that paper.

Some sales IBM could count. It records where each sales lead comes from. Leads that came in through Watson events and materials turned into $254 million of booked revenue in North America.

Other sales it couldn't count. Watson ran on IBM's POWER servers, and sales of those servers had been falling for a long time. After the show they grew, and by more than the Watson leads explain. Did the campaign make buyers keener on those servers, even where no lead recorded it? The paper thinks so, but it can't count it.

So it compares two regions. North America saw a lot of the campaign. In Western Europe IBM ran no Watson marketing and the show wasn't on television, though news of it travelled. Before the show, sales of those servers in the two regions moved closely together. After it, both grew. The paper takes the Watson leads out of North America's growth and the fall in the euro out of Europe's. The gap that is left is $68 million of revenue.

This is the part I'd copy. The paper doesn't say the campaign brought in that $68 million. It says $68 million is the most the campaign could have brought in, because the two regions differed in other ways too: "It's an upper limit as other factors in which W. Europe and NA differed will be involved". Then it leaves the $68 million out of its return altogether. The return it claims is profit of at least 2.4 times what the campaign cost, worked out on the $254 million alone.

One caution. The paper doesn't say how much of the $254 million IBM would have won anyway. It asks the question, calls it a valid one, and says that isn't how IBM judges a campaign. So we know that revenue came in through the campaign. We don't know it was extra.

The paper holds a good deal more and is worth reading in full. You can read the IPA's summary, and buy the paper, on a public page on the IPA's site.

Here is what to do in your next results paper or board report.

1. Split your result in two: what you can count, and what you think the campaign also caused.
2. For the second part, find a market like yours that saw less of the campaign, and compare the two. Call the gap the most it could be, and say what else could explain it.
3. Work out your return on the first part only. Say what you left out.

Sam