marketing marketing
John Wanamaker was a retail marketing innovator. In 1875, Wanamaker refurbished the Pennsylvania Railroad freight station to create the first department store in Philadelphia, pioneering many approaches to retail store layout and marketing that today we take for granted.
source: Wanamaker's in 1876 (WikiCommons, https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:John_Wanamaker%27s_Clothing_House,_Market_St,_Philadelphia,_PA_1876.jpg)
Alongside revolutionizing retail with the one-stop, value and entertainment-focused department store format we still have today, Wanamaker was also a pioneer in advertising, continually reinvesting his target 10% gross profit margin into attracting new customers. He is credited with being the first store to use a full-page newspaper ad in December 1879. Almost 100 years prior to Walmart, Wanamaker emphasized his company's commitment to always offering low p rices and even promised that his goods would be priced 10% lower than rivals, offering a money-back guarantee if customers could show otherwise. Unlike that of his competitors at the time, his ads were known for providing transparent information and putting the customer’s interests first.
He invested heavily in the importance of what to say and in May 1880, he hired the first world’s first full-time copywriter, John Emory Powers. Wanamaker soon organized an Advertising Bureau, in an idealized version of a newspaper staff, to draft each day’s paid ads. He gave his staff written directions to personally inspect new goods arriving at the Receiving and Stock rooms and write “short, direct vigorous sentences.” Wanamaker emphasized clear copywriting to build his store brand, drive awareness of what goods were to offer and ensure consumers felt their purchase was fair. He reminded his staff that “advertising costs more than a cablegram, so save unnecessary words.”
Today, Wanamaker is best known in advertising circles for his focus on attributing the value received for his advertising spend: “I am convinced that about one-half the money I spend for advertising is wasted, but I have never been able to decide which half.”
Wanamaker’s famous “which half” quote is commonly interpreted in relation to the difficulty in determining how the media budgets associated with particular publisher properties drive incremental sales. Keeping response rates consistent, while adjusting spend and media prices per tactic based on this feedback, yields an improved Return On Ad Spend (ROAS).
Marketing effectiveness relies on applying the correlation of allocated investments in the right context, to the right audience, along with the right message in order to drive a positive incremental return.
According to Market Research Future, the global market for marketing attribution software is expected to reach $12.4B with a 13.5% CAGR through 2030. This is no surprise, as consumers' fragmented behaviors have forced modern marketers to adopt cross-channel approaches in order to engage them in their precise moments of need while in-market for specific products and services. In our current era of sense and response marketing, it's pivotal to lean on attribution solutions that empower a holistic understanding of impact across channels, while opening up opportunities for increasing effectiveness and eliminating media waste with inflight optimization.
Today’s advanced inflight-optimization algorithms do not focus merely on what bid prices to pay or where to advertise but can also dynamically adjust the creative to better match the context in which it is delivered (e.g., contextual and native advertising) or the audiences to whom it is delivered (e.g., interest-based advertising).
To eliminate that wasted "half" Wanamaker referred to, marketers must both understand the true impact of their campaigns across key channels and metrics like brand, visit and sales lift. They also need to be able to leverage these intra-campaign metrics to drive effectiveness while campaigns are inflight. To do that today, marketers rely on open access to identifiers in order to optimize their marketing effectiveness and most importantly improve the customer experience with every interaction.
The lasting influence of Wanamaker on retail marketing offers invaluable insights for modern marketers. His unwavering emphasis on improving marketing effectiveness by continually improving his paid advertising copy, in specific placements to better appeal to new prospects and connect with existing ones looks slightly different today in our world powered by programmatic advertising solutions. However, his consistent customer-centric focus on providing genuine value rather than merely trying to unload the goods on hand is as important today as it was then.
Fortunately, advancements in gleaming real-time insights and intra-campaign optimization is possible today. Together, they enable marketers an improved ability to attribute value to the media purchased so they can create better shopping experiences and achieve better results.
The key principle behind Wanamaker’s success was built upon a fair and equitable value exchange with customers. It also serves as a reminder for all of us on the critical importance of interoperability and addressability in today’s digital marketing ecosystem, it allows us to not only understand the impact of impressions across channels, but improve every subsequent interaction. The loss of this ability to discover what matters can potentially significantly limit our ability to advance the work and progress that started with Wanamker back in 1875. Having said that, I, like Wanamaker, remain an optimist that our evolution to excellence will continue.
Joshua Koran
Chief Product Officer at InMarket
Joshua brings 25+ years of product development and innovation experience, including leadership roles with Criteo, AT&T, Yahoo!, Zeta, Sizmek and ValueClick. He’s also received recognitions from Business Insider and AdWeek for his industry contributions.