As a CFO, how many times have you gone to your company’s head of marketing and asked for dollars back in order to make up a shortfall in quarterly or year-end EPS? How many times have you wished for greater visibility into the effectiveness of marketing spending? If you're like many public-company CFOs, it's not an unusual occurrence. But you can change this dynamic and gain great new insights into marketing effectiveness by leveraging a new approach to consumer analytics -- an approach that mines social media and other customer "conversations." Advanced techniques and capabilities that are available now can help you capture the pulse of the marketplace as never before. Armed with this information, CFOs and chief marketing officers can identify the minimal effective amount of spending needed to drive the greatest market awareness. Read our new white paper to learn how this innovative form of "marketing intelligence" can dramatically reduce wasted spending and position marketing to contribute even more effectively to earnings per share.

2. CFOs:
How to Spend the
Minimal Effective
Amount on Marketing
CFOs have access to rich data and reliable metrics for
managing business performance in real or near-real time.
Inventory turns. Cycle times. Days sales outstanding. In fact,
business intelligence capabilities give today’s finance execu-
tives a good grasp of virtually every aspect of operations.
But then there’s marketing. Sure, CFOs ultimately decide
what financial resources are allocated to marketing based
on revenue expectations and marketing’s corresponding
responsibility to extend the reach of the brand and build
both customer awareness and market share. But in reality,
30 - 80%
marketing is the major budget item that traditionally has Your organization is
been the hardest to understand and measure from a probably overspending
performance standpoint. Quarterly and annual reviews
on marketing for the value
provide some idea of how the money is being spent, and
you’re getting by 30 to 80
percent.
frequency, reach, target rating points, media impressions
and press clip counts are among the long-standing measures
of marketing effectiveness. But these are becoming less and
less informative as the world moves at Internet speed.
And here’s another unsettling reality CFOs are all too
aware of: Your organization is probably overspending on
marketing for the value you’re getting by 30 to 80
percent. As U.S. department store magnate John Wanamaker
said: “Half the money I spend on advertising is wasted; the
trouble is I don’t know which half.” Knowing this, CFOs often
go to their marketing departments for spending reductions
when quarterly earnings per share (EPS) targets are not
going to be met. Marketing dollars effectively serve as a
rainy day fund that can be tapped for those extra cents per
share needed to meet Wall Street’s expectations.
It doesn’t need to be this way anymore. Through social
media and other channels, consumers are increasingly vocal
about their likes, dislikes, intent to act and discussion of
past actions.
Email: info@networkedinsights.com
Phone: 608.237.1867
www.networkedinsights.com
© 2011, Networked Insights, Inc. 2

3. Marketing can leverage these “conversations” to become far
more efficient — especially with its spending on advertising.
The key is not just to monitor the conversation, however
— almost any company can do that now with today’s social
media monitoring engines.
Instead, marketing needs techniques and analytical
capabilities that cut through the conversational clutter
to identify trends and perform predictive modeling that
not only captures the pulse of the marketplace now but
offers valuable insights as to where the market is moving
or where new markets are likely to appear. Armed with
this information, chief marketing officers can identify the
minimal effective amount of spending needed to drive the
greatest market awareness. More than half a billion
people, a twelfth of the
This new form of “marketing intelligence” can dramatically world’s population, is
reduce wasted spending. As a result, such a shift in spending connected on Facebook.
effectiveness can contribute directly to earnings per share
improvement. Marketing can finally — and with far greater
accuracy — prove its accretive value to the enterprise and
shareholders.
Right message, right place, right time
For decades marketers have considered television to be
the major driver of awareness. But today highly engaged,
potentially massive audiences can be found in many other
places. More than half a billion people, a twelfth of the
world’s population, is connected on Facebook. Twitter has
two hundred million users. Twitter has two hundred
million users.
Numbers like these demand that marketers think about us-
ing their resources differently. It’s not just about appending
social media to traditional ad buys, or even integrating the
two. Instead, CMOs can start using their customers to help
sense and inform what awareness and promotional
activities should be done in marketing and which of those
will be most effective in reaching their exact audience.
Media buying can be made hyper-efficient by abandoning
the traditional “spray and pray” approach and instead
finding out exactly when and where to use it — the times
and places that targeted consumers will not simply hear
marketing’s messages but be highly receptive to them.
Email: info@networkedinsights.com
Phone: 608.237.1867
www.networkedinsights.com
© 2011, Networked Insights, Inc. 3

4. Social Loves an Upset
CMOs can then identify the most valuable components of the
marketing arsenal — the right messages — and sequence
them in ways that both resonate with target audiences
and deliver measurable, substantial improvement in
marketing ROI.
The two largest portions of the marketing budget typically
are developing content and buying media. Being efficient
and effective in both of these processes boils down to deliv-
ering the right message in the right place at the right time.
Case study: An NCAA slam dunk
Each year American businesses brace for a productivity
plunge during the NCAA men’s collegiate basketball
tournament — by one estimate, a total hit of $1.2 billion
in 2010. Without question, March Madness stirs the
passion of fans from coast to coast.
Companies typically try to capitalize on this fervor
by adhering to a traditional marketing approach. One
consumer services company believed it could dominate
its category during the three-week tournament by buying
exclusive advertising rights to TV broadcasts of games,
at a cost of about $42 million. By throwing this
expensive advertising blanket over the proceedings, the
company effectively locked a competitor out of direct
tournament advertising.
Searching for another way to get in front of tournament
fans, the competitor turned to Networked Insights, which
used social media data analysis to build a strategy for reach-
ing this target audience at a fraction of the price of the TV
buy. The typical approach in a situation such as this is to buy
up all the online media, but there simply isn’t enough online
content to achieve the same reach as a TV buy. Social media engagement around
So Networked Insights challenged this approach and
teams with the biggest upsets.
uncovered one especially promising insight associated with
March Madness — the appeal of the upset. Combining social
media and search data analysis, we learned that of all the
storylines emerging during the tournament, the one fans
enjoy and talk about more than any other is David taking
down Goliath in a real upset.
Email: info@networkedinsights.com
Phone: 608.237.1867
www.networkedinsights.com
© 2011, Networked Insights, Inc. 4

5. To capitalize on this interest, the company could develop
and license content associated with upsets — the creative
possibilities are endless — and then be ready to roll it
whenever the little guys triumph. Placement opportunities
could include interstitial ads that appear when someone goes
to YouTube looking for upset-themed videos. Google search
results could include company-generated links that drive users
to company-sponsored content.
Sequencing became the key to the success of such an approach.
Content should be placed in venues that enable it to ripple
and increase its social reach as much as possible as people
pass it around.
Networked Insights’ comparison of the effectiveness of
a targeted, sequenced media approach and a traditional
exclusive-rights approach revealed striking differences. By
modeling the overall ripple effect and social reach of the
sequenced approach, we proved that a $2 million paid media
More than 95 percent of the
investment would generate the same amount of reach and brand
produced (Figure 1). $42 million spent using the
awareness as the $42 million spent on traditional advertising
traditional media approach
Investment Summary was wasted.
NUMBER OF SOCIAL
IMPRESSIONS IMPRESSIONS COST
(Figure 1)
Viewed another way, more than 95 percent of the $42 million
spent using the traditional media approach was wasted. That’s
about $40 million that could have been spent on other priori-
ties, or taken to the bottom line to boost EPS. For this client,
that translated into 8 cents of EPS for the quarter.
A slam dunk indeed. Email: info@networkedinsights.com
Phone: 608.237.1867
www.networkedinsights.com
© 2011, Networked Insights, Inc. 5

6. How to make it happen
What can you as CFO do to set your company on the path to
hyper-efficient spending on marketing? A good place to start
is by asking the CMO if he or she knows the minimal effective
amount the company can spend on marketing to reach the
awareness goals it seeks.
More than likely, your CMO will not know what you mean.
This line of thinking is new, and the methodologies and tech-
nology that enable this type of social media data analysis have
only come into their own in the past two years. In light of this,
a valuable next step is to conduct a pilot program to begin
identifying inefficiencies and realigning resources to the
rapidly changing, social media-infused marketplace.
Networked Insights was
founded in 2006 by industry
leaders and seasoned entrepre-
Begin to tap the true value of marketing
CFOs are sometimes grateful that marketing provides a piggy- neurs in the fields of social media
bank their company can draw from to shore up earnings. But and customer intelligence.
they also know that the flab in the marketing budget is stark Headquarters are in Madison,
evidence of costly, continuing inefficiency. WI, with offices in New York
and Chicago.
Consumer analytics can help CFOs and CMOs speak the same
language and, for the first time, understand the minimal effec-
tive amount they need to spend on their marketing initiatives.
Placing the right message in the right place at the right time
based on quantifiable real-time “intelligence,” your company
can economically reach target audiences that are tuned in and
responsive to your message, while enjoying a boost in EPS.
EXAMPLE WORKSHEET
Total Savings on Advertising 50,000,000
Number of Shares Outstanding 534,000,000
Impact on EPS 8 cents per share
Email: info@networkedinsights.com
Phone: 608.237.1867
www.networkedinsights.com
© 2011, Networked Insights, Inc. 6