File this under: Oops.

Google’s stock has flown high on revenue from paid search and advertising. One of the most compelling motivations for allocating a bigger chunk of your marketing budget to paid search and online ads is the measurability of the click-stream. When you run an ad in, let’s say, a newspaper, you have to do a lot of engineering to create a campaign where impressions can be tracked to top-line revenue. Special discounts, special URLs or phone numbers, staggered drop dates–all just to be able to pinpoint how many people read the ad and then bought what was advertised.

On the Web, you can follow the clicks from an advertisement or listing directly through to the order page. You can adjust your campaigns to improve performance rapidly by testing different types of ads,  messages and placements until you identify the package that performs the best. Good marketing.

So Google, raking in the ad dollars hand over fist from the frenzy of marketers who want campaigns they can track, decided it would be a good idea to enhance their Advertising offering with Web analytics. If customers are coming to you because they can better track their marketing ROI, why not up the ante and provide them more powerful tools to track it? Brilliant.

Google went out and bought Urchin, a Web analytics company that’s been around for years offering  simplified reporting tools for tracking page views and visitors and other statistics about Web site performance. The plan was to provide Google’s advertisers with a way to track the click-throughs and conversions on their campaigns. They called it Google Analytics.

Unfortunately, Google went from raking in the cash to stepping on the rake and getting nailed by the handle. Forget about the debacle they had during their launch, the real story is that some users are beginning to find the analytics so useful they can slash their budget for paid search and online ads. The CEO of a well-known hosted application company told me that the analytics opened his eyes to the poor ROI of his online spend with Google, and now he’s looking for other channels to replace it.

I don’t know, is that like upselling the emperor on a big mirror so he can see the nice new clothes he just bought?

Don’t get me wrong–I think Adwords is a great product for certain types of marketing campaigns. But so many marketers have become double-fisted drinkers of the Adwords Kool-aid, I think the whole thing’s a little Bubble-icious. I just never thought it would be Google supplying the pin to pop it.

There’s an article posted in the current issue of CMO Magazine describing "The Future CMO".
You should read it, because it’s a perfect guide to how marketers can
continue to crash and burn. On the surface, the article is right on
target. It resonates perfectly with the marketer who has his back to
the wall, offering a clear antithesis
to all of the complaints about marketing coming from the boardroom, but
providing no real clue to the underlying dry rot of the marketing
practice. "Here I come," it seems to say, "responding to the pressure for accountability with
snappy financial lingo, crisp analytics, and a  network of engineers
who respect me." It sounds like the vision
of marketing by a clueless Marketing Executive staring lovingly in
the mirror.

The current obsession with financial issues simply reflects that
it’s through the window of performance metrics that we’re able to see
that marketing is broken. Learning financial concepts is important
because it makes your understanding of the indicators more acute–but
it doesn’t solve the problem. The CMO Magazine article articulates many
of the shortcomings of the marketing function–inability to link
programs to the bottom line, failure to integrate with other functions,
myopic focus on soft campaign measures–but seems to suggest that the
solution lies in restating attacks as declarative statements of what
marketing will be, some misty day in the future. What? You say we don’t
have metrics? Well, in the future we WILL have metrics.

The most amazing section of this article is this statement:

To their surprise, the group’s findings suggest that the biggest
challenge may not be getting CEOs and CMOs to see eye to eye. One may
speak the language of revenue while the other may prefer talking about
customer satisfaction and brand awareness, but the research indicates
that these groups are on the same page when it comes to identifying a
company’s most pressing marketing concerns.

"We did not find any major difference between the CEOs and CMOs on any major topic," says McNally.

CEOs
and CMOs with no difference on the most pressing marketing concerns?
This says everything about the actual survey, which I’d love to see.
Where are CMOs and CEOs perfectly aligned? Tactical management of the
marketing function. Where are CMOs and CEOs standing on opposite sides
of a tremendous gulf? On defining the strategic contribution of
marketing to the organization. Apparently the survey didn’t dig into the debate over the ultimate role of marketing in the organization, or it polled only those executives who accept the notion that marketing is little more than managing lead generation. If you want to talk about efficiency,
CEOs and CMOs are aligned, because it’s all about tactical improvements. If you want to talk about effectiveness,
CEOs and CMOs are in different worlds, because it requires a view of marketing that includes corporate strategy.

Most CEOs in America are weaned on the Porter,
TQM, Balanced Scorecard, Core Competency, Lean Production, Six Sigma,
Resource-based mindset of corporate strategy, which essentially
relegates marketing to a line function to be managed as efficiently as
possible. Strategy is a pre-packaged mandate and the title of "CMO" is given out to
soothe the egos of glorified marketing program managers. That’s not
true at all companies of course, but it’s the mass of the bell curve.
How do CMOs change the tide? Not by dipping their oars into the surface
currents while the deeper water sweeps them out to sea.

Personally, I’m looking for a Future CMO who
has an open invitation to the strategy discussion because they have
retooled their marketing organizations from the ground up by actively
serving their internal teams as well as they serve customers; they have
engineered processes as efficient as they are effective; and they have
relevant contributions to make to the strategy debate based on real
world experience in market development, customer intimacy, competitive
positioning, and brand management. Not because they’ve learned to keep
"ROI on the tip of their tongue".