“Over the next five years, marketing and PR agencies that can show that they deliver provable business impact will win significant market share. Those that just continue to sell marketing and PR services will begin to disappear.”
NEW YORK, June 13, 2017 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- For the past two decades, Mark Hass has stood out in marketing and PR circles. He has served as CEO of some of the top agencies in the world, including Edelman. As a professor at both Arizona State University and Princeton University, he is well-known as a deep thinker about the ways in which marketing and communications must transform in order to deliver what clients are already demanding but not receiving.
As a senior advisor and evangelist for Proof, Hass will focus on helping agencies understand and integrate Proof’s best-in-class attribution platform into their client work.
“Right now is a pivotal moment for marketing and PR agencies,” said Hass. “Over the next five years, agencies that deliver provable business impact will win significant market share, and those that continue to sell marketing and PR services will recede and ultimately disappear. This transformation is already happening now on the client side, and the velocity of this change will continue to accelerate dramatically in the next several years.”
The marketing and PR industries are under increasing pressure from boards of directors and CEOs to prove the impact of their programs, and the average tenure of Fortune 1000 CMOs has dipped below two years. Both of those issues are rooted in poor evaluation of the business value of marketing and communications spend, in contrast to the more robust evaluation techniques used by other key corporate departments.
“Some agencies are already in transition to a ‘hybrid model’ that combines traditional fee structures and new performance-based compensation. These agencies will continue to take substantial market share based on a compensation model that is economically aligned to their clients’ business interests and rooted in unprecedented access to data and new data analytics platforms. They will grow their top line aggressively and organically, and they will lead the industry by reinvigorating margin expansion by being able to charge more for business impact.”
Hass has more than three decades of experience as a journalist, entrepreneur and strategic communications professional. He was President and CEO of Edelman, the world’s largest independent marketing agency, as well as global CEO of MS&L Group, a top-ten public relations firm. Today, he is a professor of practice at the Walter Cronkite School of Journalism and Mass Communications and the W. P. Carey School of Business at Arizona State University, where he specializes in strategic communications and marketing. He also teaches at Princeton University’s Center for Information Technology Policy, an interdisciplinary academic unit that addresses digital technologies as they interact with society.
Joe Paluska is a member of Proof’s board of directors. The global technology chairman for many years at Edelman and Hill & Knowlton before founding brand-first venture group Heroes.Run, Paluska said: “For years, marketers and PR pros have longed for the ‘Holy Grail,’ the ability to prove business impact and business value. The problem for Mark Hass, and for the rest of us who have led agencies in our careers, was the absence of the sort of data analytics that could turn this aspiration into a workable business model. A significant obstacle was our inability to understand the time lag that existed between our programs and any business impact. A great marketing and communications program does not instantly impact sales and reputation, and understanding that time lag is crucial to any follow-on analytics. That’s where Proof comes in.”
Using long-accepted advanced mathematics, the Proof algorithmic engine bridges that gap and automates the computation of the business impact delivered by corporate functions like marketing and communications.
Hass believes that Proof will accelerate the transformation of the marketing and PR agency business model and how those agencies are compensated. “If you are an agency leader, now is the time to realize that you are no longer selling time and talent – you are selling provable audience influence and business impact, both of which are significantly more monetizable than your entire agency’s hourly rates combined. A business model rooted in the proven delivery of business impact is the only fair and viable option for agencies and clients alike. The emergence of the Proof software platform means that the 'missing link' needed to calibrate this new agency model has been forged.”
This fundamental question of impact and value goes to the heart of the past, present and future of marketing and PR. “The great news is that the calculations show that most marketers and communicators are tremendously successful in delivering real business impact,” said Mark Stouse, founder and CEO of Proof. “The arrival of Proof means that these two extremely valuable but paradoxically under-valued professions can demonstrate their worth beyond all doubt.”
Read what others have recently written about Proof:
- Martech Advisor: 5 Reasons CMOs Are Failing at ROI
- MartechToday: "New Analytics Platform Called Proof Correlates Marketing Impact Despite Time Lag"
- VentureBeat: "Proof Lands $2 Million to Explain Cause and Effect of Marketing Spend"
About Proof
Proof is the first collective intelligence software platform in the world to allow networks of people and teams to collaborate securely across organizational lines in order to integrate their data and jointly validate their business impact. Learn more at proofanalytics.ai or @proofanalytics, or call or text Mike Atwood at 603-305-2165 to schedule a Proof demo. #ProveIt2017 #proCMO #proCCO #proCFO #proAgency