CTAM in NY: Briggs: SIRFs Will Be the "Face of Marketing"

New York -- Rex Briggs, founder and CEO, Marketing Evolution, wants marketers to go from merely measuring ROI to managing it.

The key to doing this, he said at CTAM in New York during his presentation entitled "The Super Glue of Attribution Modeling," is with the employment of SIRFs -- or Spend to Impact Response Functions -- that show how all different ROIs work across a range of marketing spending, using heavy up media tests, Marketing Mix Modeling analysis, or ROMO, which measures both sales and behavior.

SIRFs are a way for marketers to look forward and see how campaigns will work, instead of reviewing data from past campaigns "as a report card." This is key in the evolution of the approach to marketing, as attribution modeling displays its advantages over more traditional analysis. 

SIRFs allow marketers to: "1) determine the optimal level of total marketing spend to maximize profits; 2) determine the optimal marketing mix; 3) forecast sales based on different levels of marketing spend; 4) determine the optimal pricing and discount strategies; and 5) determine the impact of external shocks."

"The ability to see [the data] as an equation is transformative," Briggs says.

The integrated data set is a key advantage of attribution modeling, with the analytics focusing on the use of customer level data to identify how to develop better marketing objectives and subsequently more ROI.

Briggs says that SIRFs are on their way to becoming the "face of marketing." The entire process of transferring to the new tools takes about 6 months, and 9 months before the data is complete.

"[The power of SIRFs] is going to make that a term that none of you had heard about today...but I can guarantee you...in two years, it will become part of our vocabulary," Briggs said.