This week I attended a LinkedIn roundtable about building a brand within their paid advertisement platform. Philips showed their case and Jason Miller, one of LinkedIns’ own content leaders, presented a couple of cases to show success. It was a lot about how to create content for the purpose of building a brand. Which means not so much talking about the brand but more about the values your company stands for. A group of about 15 peers sitting with me in the room from a variety of well known companies like Booking.com, Adyen, KPN and Deloitte. At a certain moment I was expecting the answer on how to measure and proof the impact of a brand campaign on leadgen activities but in my opinion the answer was not sufficient enough. I expressed my concern within the group and fairly quickly statements like ‘but you have to believe in building a brand…’ and ‘it is extremely difficult to measure the impact on leadgen…’ were dropped. Than I realized, we are still far away from getting the right answer.

We are still far away from getting the right answer.

Uber

I felt I had to defend myself explaining that I fully understand getting the right answer is difficult. I even had to explain that I truly believe that building a brand is important. With a sponsorship of Max Verstappen and experiencing the impact of this every day I also see that is has value. But the question is: how much value? Preferably in Euro’s. In the last couple of years we ran many many tests on how to maximize the impact of Max for building reach and getting engagement. But the question is: how much value? Preferably in Euro’s. We see and feel that is has an impact but still I have difficulties to directly relate it to an uptake for instance in engagement and conversion uptake in our leadgen campaigns. ‘Keep on believing in it’ was the message within the group but I am not satisfied with that. I will keep on working to find the answer how to measure and how to maximize the impact.

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Until now the person who was perfectly able to explain the necessity for having a strong brand and an audience who is associating your brand with your values was Patrick Stal, head of EMEA marketing at Uber. I met him at a dinner a couple of months ago where he gave a short talk about the things he is working on. Until recently there was no necessity for running marketing and branding campaigns. Their services delivered via their well known app apparently was answering such a huge need that organically they grew to a multi billion company. A dream for every marketer where the product or service itself is the marketing. But last year a series of scandals popped up and as a result the CEO has to step down. This had a huge impact on the perception of Uber as a trustworthy company and brand. The only thing they could rely on was their extremely easy to use app with lower than normal fares. But having these kind of challenges, scandals, privacy issues and legal disappointments such an app is not sufficient enough anymore. The people didn’t have anything to fall back on. Who was Uber anyway? Where did they stand for? What is where they believe in? What is their bigger purpose in life? All questions Uber itself but especially the market was not able to answer. Uber was a well known logo, no so much a strong brand build upon some strong values.

Attribution

I think we have sufficient media channels where we can start building our brand. It is more about the content you create and the way you execute your campaigns across these variety of media channels. LinkedIn for sure can play a role in this just like Google, Facebook, Instagram and other offline means. Every day my teams are looking for wasy how to further optimize their campaigns. Once we run our brand campaigns they are utmost eager to see how and where they can measure impact. Within certain networks we can see first signs of success where Google still gives us the best tools and measures to get it right with its attribution model. Last year we invested a lot in the Google Marketing Platform. The good thing is that lots of data is connected with each other. Google still gives us the best tools and measures to get it right. Campaign data coming from multiple paid networks and website visitor data. Building segments and serving the most relevant messages offsite and onsite becomes daily practice. Google DoubleClick still needs further optimizations from our side to broaden our reach of measures to non-Google networks. A great challenge we work on every day. I expect that in a year from now I can give you a better answer on how to measure and execute brand campaigns in such a way so it has maximum impact in your leadgen. Until than I will keep you posted about the progress that we make.