Unbridled fealty to ROI is a road to disaster. There is a better way.
The Age of ROI has already spawned an evil twin: the Age of DROI, Diminished Return on Investment.
The jury is in, and the verdict is all but uncontestable: We work harder and longer now for fewer professional and personal returns. We have less discretionary income, far less if any real job security, and -- most important -- far less discretionary time to show for our immersion in, and fealty to, the digital god of ROI.
The digitally-induced ROI mantra of "faster, smarter, better" has already succumbed in many minds and hearts to the lurking and growing suspicion that faster, smarter, better will simply never be fast, smart, or good enough, no matter how hard we try, how fast we run, or how much intellectual muscle we flex. We are trapped in our own inertia, and we can't escape it because we see no alternative to it. These are the signature characteristics of addiction. Faster smarter better is in fact the mantra of digital addicts out of control with no way out.
I only mention the above because the industry most at risk in the Age of DROI is the digital marketing industry itself, for a number of reasons, beginning with the fact that digital marketers are without a doubt the most obsessive compulsive and addicted people on the planet right now, by any measure. I don't mean to offend, and I would most certainly place myself right near the top of the digital addict roll call, but I think the time has come to call a spade a spade and look for a better way to live and a better way to conduct business.
Albert Einstein once observed that no problem can be solved by the same thinking that created the problem. Likewise, the thinking that creates the addiction ultimately becomes the only thinking that the addiction itself will tolerate. This explains why the digital marketing community's early adoption and elevation of ROI as the primary USP to distinguish itself from traditional -- and presumably less accountable -- media channels has evolved into an illusory and self-defeating quest of near-epic proportions.
Continuing to pound the ROI drum ad nauseum will only cast the digital marketing community in the unsavory role of devil incarnate as the quality of life continues to erode and buckle under the weight of our technology-enabled addictions. Consider the collective impact of our ongoing, obscenely expensive and high-profile battles against spam, malicious viruses, copyright theft, online terrorist recruitment campaigns and child pornography. All of these things might have been easier to overlook or excuse when folks were still getting rich during the dotcom bubble, back when our investments in time and money still seemed like sure bets.
But now, in the aftermath of the market crash and 9/11, they constitute major withdrawals from the digital marketing industry brand bank, and -- like all behaviors associated with addictions -- reflect deeper problems that can only escalate and manifest themselves in other damaging ways over time. All remedial or prophylactic measures we might introduce in response to them are post facto at best, invoked only after the damage has already been done.
Time and money dedicated to any addiction is time and money diverted away from the quality of life. Likewise, time and money dedicated by the digital marketing industry to its obsession with ROI is time and money tragically diverted away from what always has been and should be the true USP of digital marketing: intimacy.
Intimacy -- the ability of the digital channels to engender intimate relationships -- is the true coin of the interactive realm, and its only potential savior. The pursuit of intimacy holds forth the only promise to re-introduce the cult of personality into our relationships. And that's the only way to confront the single biggest problem for small-to-midsize digital marketers: the inability to distinguish themselves from the other 9,999 small-to-midsize digital marketers making the exact same claims in the exact same space. The cult of ROI commodifies and devalues everything it touches -- our creative and strategic assets not least -- and inevitably reduces all value propositions to the most cynical consideration: price point. Business development, account management and growth, and client loyalty are all threatened by the fact that there are thousands of competitors waiting just outside the door to drop their pants a little faster and bend over the very moment you drop the relationship ball.
Besides, ROI is just a lousy basket for digital marketers to put all their eggs in. First of all, any claim of enhanced ROI is hardly unique to the digital channels. Just ask ACNielsen, Arbitron, the Audit Bureau of Circulations, or any of the thousands of media franchises whose performance they've audited for decades. Next, any claims to enhanced ROI will likely ring more than a little hollow after the digital industry squandered more than 60 percent of all monies raised -- hundreds of billions of dollars -- on television advertising during the dot com bubble. Finally, interactive's obsession with ROI is predicated in large part on the mistaken assumption that performance sells. It doesn't. Personality sells. And personality can only be conveyed through intimacy, by creating co-conspiratorial environments-to-buy wherein clients and customers feel comfortable and secure enough to loosen their purse strings. Performance is merely what you pull out of your bag of tricks whenever personality wears a little thin.
Moreover, the digital marketing industry's obsession with ROI will only reinforce the firewall that separates it from traditional media and refute any sincere efforts to integrate them. Contrary to the tired claims of the digital marketing industry, the firewall that separates traditional and interactive has nothing to do with traditional media's inability to "get it." On the contrary, the traditional boys and girls "got" print, then they "got" radio, then they "got" broadcast TV and direct response, then they "got" cable TV, and now they "get" interactive, big time.
To suggest otherwise and blame colleagues engaged in other media is patently absurd, condescending, and a glaring example of addiction at works, a form of digital denial at its worst. The firewall that exists between the digital and traditional media cultures exists only because the digital marketing industry put it there in the first place. The continued focus on ROI only keeps it there. All we need to do as an industry is trumpet the virtues of intimacy in the Age of DROI, and that wall will come tumbling down.
Here's what we'll discover and rediscover on the other side the very moment that wall comes down, the moment we shift our primary focus from ROI to the pursuit of intimacy: We'll rediscover the deep human values in our own mission statements. We'll rediscover our ability to distinguish ourselves at point of sale. We'll rediscover our ability to engender client loyalty. We'll rediscover the ability to set and maintain realistic client expectations. We'll discover that the traditional media players are our allies, not our enemies.
Finally, we'll discover that our ability to engender ROI in the Age of DROI is directly dependent on our ability to engender intimacy and promote personality first.
Jeff Einstein is an old timer in new media, dating back to 1984 when he co-founded Einstein and Sandom, Inc., the nation's first interactive advertising agency, and the first player in what later became New York City's multi-billion dollar Silicon Alley new media industry. Over the past two decades, his marketing strategies have resulted in the direct acquisition of two agencies, the global growth of a third, and a high-tech IPO, and have been featured in virtually every major business publication, including cover stories in The Wall Street Journal, Red Herring Magazine, George, PC Magazine, and The New York Times Sunday Magazine.
Mr. Einstein currently works as a marketing consultant, and is at work on his latest book, High Wired: The Essential 21st Century Guide to the Quality of Life, an exploration of the digital downside and how to deal with it in our lives and work.