magic numbers

Is influencer marketing right for you? The chart is from a big new survey by YouGov that asked over 10,000 respondents all around the world all about influencers. It shows the topics where influencers are particularly, ahem… influential. Around 60% of people find influencer content on travel, fitness, tech, and fashion useful. So, these products are good contenders for a strong effect of sponsored content on sales. At the other end of the scale, the topics we don’t want at dinner parties are also the ones we avoid in conversation online: Politics and religion content is seen as the least useful. But be careful, because culture matters. For example, in Indonesia, 86% of respondents find travel content useful compared to only 36% of Danish respondents. It’s all part of emerging learning about how best to use influencers. Other recent gems include a report by The Drum that Gen Z audiences trust influencers more than celebrities. And one to treat with some caution from the influencer benchmark report, which shows the average payback from influencers is $5.78 per $1 dollar spent. If you’re not yet ready for big business brand-building, but worry you’re too reliant on performance marketing, influencers, just like online video can be a low-cost route to a new phase of growth. Find out how to tackle it in our super practical, accessible, and no-nonsense Scaling Up Works course. There’s still time to sign up via the link in the comments or chat to Imogen Howard for group bookings or questions via hello@magicworks.training

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It’s a slippery slope… Moving money from traditional budgets into search ads on retailers’ sites, is like paying the rent out of your savings. It can only lead to poverty ahead. It’s because retailers, and especially Amazon, control such a large share of product buying traffic, you have to be there if you want your product to be available to buy. This means they can charge what they like. The chart shows that, aside from a COVID blip, it’s costing UK businesses more and more of their revenues and profits, each year. The slippery slope comes because the only way to avoid continuing to pay as prices for this type of ad go up is to invest into your brand. Because if people want your product before they get to the search page, any set of search results for the category which doesn’t include you is “wrong”. And auction algorithms, which value relevance as well as advertising revenue, will allow you to be there for a reasonable price.💰 So don’t plunder your TV or out of home budget to pay retail-media rent in 2025. Instead, make the case now that this must be paid for out of the distribution or merchandising budget. Dr Grace Kite's latest article, link in comments, is all about this challenge, and how to navigate it in the coming years. 🚩 If you want to avoid paying for online ads that you don’t need and get the balance of brand and performance right, you should join our course Scaling Up Works, starting today! Final chance to sign up is 28th October. And if there’s a few of you that need to learn, speak to Imogen Howard for group bookings or questions via hello@magicworks.training.

📢Scaling Up Works onboarding week starts today!   Want to balance brand and performance right and identify successful, low-risk, achievable routes into building demand?   Join us on our online training course Scaling Up Works with Dr Grace Kite.   It’s all about how to unlock a new phase of growth without the need for bigger budgets. And how to take a business whose love language is numbers through the transition that’s needed.   Including:   • Relevant frameworks • Modern case studies • Practical methods • Benchmarks from the experience of hundreds of other businesses   It’s hands-on, practical training that fits in with your schedule.   So you can put your money where the magic is.   🚩Sign up via the link in the comments or email Imogen Howard via hello@magicworks.training for group bookings or questions. Last chance to sign up is 25th October.

If you want a bigger marketing budget you’ve got to be able to talk turkey.🦃 Marketers who measure and report return-on-investment are 1.6 times more likely to get a bigger budget. Put yourself in your CFO’s shoes. He or she isn’t a baddie, just a practical numbers person that wants to do the things that’ll make the company grow and avoid taking too many risks. The job is to adjudicate on an inbox full of 100 different things the company might buy, from machines in the factory, to an R&D hire, to a better fleet of delivery vans. And every time something is approved it comes out profits and makes that all important P&L look worse, at least for a time. The decision to approve is about two things: The likely payback and the chances that the person asking the money will manage this expenditure well. Measuring ROI ticks both of those boxes because it not only quantifies the benefits of marketing, it also shows that you’re doing the work to learn and improve how you do it. 🚩If you want to learn more about advertising ROI, including how to do a rough estimate for yourself, how to commission analytics for an accurate read, and how to avoid pitfalls, you should join our Data Works course. There’s still time to sign up, the final deadline is 18th September. Link in comments to book now. Got questions or a group? Chat to Imogen Howard via hello@magicworks.training and she’ll help you out. For econometrics/MMM drop Dr Grace Kite a message.

New and fresh from the IPA Effectiveness Conference! A free tool, to help you huddle with finance and come up with the best possible 2025. Finance are not the baddies. They care about doing the best for the business, perhaps even more than you do. But they get soooo many business cases for spending the company’s money and it’s a task to prioritise all the options. When you put forward your marketing plan, finance has to decide whether that’s a better use of the money than something else. So, show a bit of sympathy for the devil…. ahem, no… some empathy for finance. And help them out. Our new tool, jauntily named “compare the cashflow” uses a framework that finance love – called discounted cashflow – to make it super easy to compare a media plan to an R&D project, or a new factory.🏭 Depending on your category, media mix and creative quality, it gives you an estimate of expected revenue over the next three years and accounts for cashflows in the future being worth less than today. It then compares against another investment of your choice. Just work with finance – they don’t bite – to input the expected return and risk level and let the tool do the rest. 🚩Link in the comments to a bundle of useful stuff. The tool itself, a little video to help you use it, and Dr Grace Kite's slides from the conference.

Better creative, better ROI. Simples! The chart above shows that there really is something about ads themselves that determine whether campaigns will pay back, and if so, how much. System 1’s star and spike scores are established before ads even air, they measure what audiences feel when seeing an ad, and, as the chart shows, that predict payback. The chart comes from a study with WARC, but we’ve seen it at magic numbers in our econometrics too. Like the FMCG that had three different creatives before, during, and after COVID-19: • The first, pre-pandemic, had close ups of people using the product, it had a weak creative quality score, and in econometrics a short-lived effect and weak ROI • The second was about how this business was mucking in to help in the pandemic. It had a good creative score, a longer-lived effect and a middling ROI • After COVID, with a new CMO and a new agency, the third campaign was full of family stories and it had happy music. It had a great creative score and a stonking ROI. So, here’s the useful bit, the thing you can do differently: Make great ads. If you don’t know how, our course Scaling Up Works won’t be much use to you. Try Orlando Wood’s course or James Hurman’s course. Scaling Up Works is for people who need to get this sort of campaign agreed in the first place, and need to choose the right media channels to use, for the perfect mix of brand and performance. 🚩If that’s you, the start date is 15th October and you can contact Imogen Howard via hello@magicworks.training for questions or group bookings.

They don't do an award for numbers-geeks agency of the year. But if they did, magic numbers/Analytic Partners would probably be it. Last night at the IPA (Institute of Practitioners in Advertising) awards, our clients took home 1 golds, 2 silvers, and 2 bronzes, along with the Broadbent special prize. It means a lot. The technical judges are sceptical, fierce and working hard to pick holes. So when our work stands up in that forum, you can believe its because we get the numbers right, even the super complex ones. And you can believe that the marketing our clients do, with our advice in the bag, really really works. So congrats to Yorkshire Tea + Lucky Generals + Goodstuff for their gold, to McDonald's + Leo Burnett UK and VCCP + Cadbury UK for their silver and Broadbent prize. And well done Müller UK & Ireland and VANGUARD INSURANCE too for their bronzes. In the pic are the fabulous contributing authors our side Joy Talbot, Carly Greenfield, Kevin O' Farrell, Luke McParland

It’s onboarding week for our course Data Works; the “how to use” guide for marketing data!   In modern marketing, data matters. Because if you’re stronger with data, you’re able to see the things that are right to do.   And, if you want your ideas to be credible, convincing, and compelling you need data. But it doesn’t have to be rocket science. You can be great with data even if you didn’t like maths at school.   This course makes data doable.   It covers things you should do to make sure your marketing is the best it can be. Including…   • Using data wisely and avoid being misled • Presenting data in an easy-to-understand way📈 • Spotting issues scuppering your marketing • Harnessing hardcore analytics   It’s hands-on, practical training that fits in with your schedule and you’ll have lots of support from Dr Grace Kite the lovely team at magic works.   So you can get to grips with data and give your marketing the magic touch.   🚩Follow the link in comments sign up today or email Imogen Howard via hello@magicworks.training for group bookings or questions.

There’s a subtle effect of being on TV – via the Google auctions – that most people don’t know about. It’s no secret that pound for pound TV often comes up in econometrics as one of the best channels for delivering visits to your site and converting them at scale. So, its no surprise that this finding was confirmed when ITV carried out 30 rigorously designed regional tests. The chart shows that, on average in these experiments, running a TV campaign brought a 23% increase in site traffic and a 33% increase in conversions. The tests also revealed a less obvious effect, working in the background. They showed that TV actually influences the paid search auction. In fact, a TV campaign makes you much more likely to appear at the top of brand search term auctions, to the tune of an extra 41%.📺 This means businesses that buy TV are more likely to appear in the top slot on Google when people search for them, and they pay less, per click, for their customers’ journeys through the search environment. The success of media channel is often considered in a silo. Did it drive an uplift in conversions or awareness or some other similar KPI? Indirect effects and synergies are rarely fully taken into account. A good measurement framework will set you up to understand both direct and indirect effects of your marketing mix. Our Data Works course teaches you how to set up your MMM in a way that captures all of these. With killer charts, stats and more it’s the “how to use” guide for marketing data. 🚩The next intake is 8th October – it’s out onboarding week! Link in comments to sign up and read more. For group bookings or questions chat to Imogen Howard via hello@magicworks.training If you’re interested in analytics, drop Dr Grace Kite a message.