An ad designed to get you to watch another ad

Based on our marketing research (quick pitch: the new Blackfriars Marketing Index comes out on Tuesday, February 15), Blackfriars has hard data that shows that companies that use objective data to measure their marketing results have higher satisfaction with their marketing AND get bigger marketing budgets. It just makes sense: if you can prove that a dollar spent on marketing gives you company a 5% increase in clients or a 3% improvement in customer satisfaction, spending money on marketing becomes a simple business decision for the CEO instead of an act of faith. But only about two-thirds of firms measure their marketing results, so there are still a lot of companies winging it.

Here's a symptom of one of those companies: today's Sunday New York Times has a full page ad on page 14 (the back of the front section). In this ad, Revlon pictures a group of models and encourages people to watch their new ad campaign on Desperate Housewives tonight.

So let me get this straight. Revlon spent several hundred thousand dollars on the NYTimes ad to drive people to their $300,000 per 30-second-spot TV ad? Said another way, what is the return on investment (ROI) for that full-page ad?

My opinion: this is a great example of an agency spending media dollars without any accountability for results. If I were Revlon, I'd be asking for the data that shows that this full-page ad actually bought them results. I believe the agency would be hard-pressed to provide such a number. But I'm willing to be convinced; if anyone out there has hard data that shows ads for ads work, I'd love to see it.