You speak Portuguese, but I'll just speak Spanish to you.

I used to play in an indoor soccer league one night each week. I was the goalie on a team of Brazilian soccer players who were working on a Brazilian product team for Motorola. These guys all spoke English perfectly, but after a game, someone from the other team approached our team captain speaking Spanish. I leaned over to this guy and let him know that Portuguese was the language spoken in Brazil, not Spanish. He looked at me, shrugged his shoulders, and then proceeded to continue speaking in Spanish.

Are you speaking the wrong language to your clients? As a DR-focused brand, our philosophy is that all of our advertising dollars are measured purely in terms of ROI. We don't allocate dollars toward branding, but rather look at branding as a byproduct of running a ton of direct response advertising. Doing business with me means that you have to talk with me in terms of ROI and the metrics that matter to my brand.

A few years ago, we were working with a search agency that sold us on the fact that it could help us reach all of our goals. The firm's references were pretty good, and it had a good name in the industry. But within a couple of months, it started to become clear that we were speaking different languages. I was looking at a monthly report and noticed that half of our budget was spent on a keyword that was producing a cost-per-lead that was five-times higher than our target. Needless to say, I was furious and brought this to the agency's attention.

I scheduled a conference call with our entire account team, as well as our sales rep. After expressing my dissatisfaction with the performance and requesting an explanation, the head of the account team spoke up. She explained that the keyword in question was really performing incredibly because it was reaching 90 percent of our target audience on Google, Yahoo, and MSN. This sort of reach into our target audience was a smart move to advance our brand.

After explaining again why having a cost-per-lead that was five-times higher than our allowable target was not OK, our account rep was at a loss for words. She couldn't figure out why we took issue with the performance of this keyword. She was looking at the entire account, especially this specific keyword, in terms of branding goals, while we were looking at it terms of direct response metrics.

Because we couldn't resolve the language barrier, we ultimately took our account to a different agency that did speak our language.