Proving ROI naturally involves work for someone else. And in this instance, that someone was me. It came as no surprise when marketing asked... sorry, told "accounts" (as they insist on calling us) that they wanted a boat-load of reports detailing every last item they spent and how that increased "brand equity". None of the standard reports – embedded with some really lovely graphs that usually keep the cake-decorators happy – that I'd tucked away in the digital equivalent of my bottom drawer were any good. So I wasted the quiet period one month creating new spreadsheets while some marketing exec fussed around telling me I wasn't doing it right.
Anyway, I came up with my usual elegant, linked workbook solution –you know the stuff, a page per brand/area/period, linked together and linked through. I'd checked and rechecked all the formulae, of course. I even provided a pretty graphical summary sheet – which my boss, the FD, took credit for when the board decided the marketing director's monthly "adjusted brand valuator reports" were "really helping them focus on the company's strategic objectives" (at least that's what the in-house newsletter said).
Of course, this forecasting and reporting bliss couldn't last. I'd told one of the marketing bunnies not to mess with the formulae, on pain of not processing her ridiculously hyped expenses. "Just put the numbers into these cells, the rest will just drop out automatically," I'd said. She seemed to have taken the point. But she left the company – to go travelling with her boyfriend or something – and had passed the "compiling of the valuator reports" (i.e. plugging in the numbers – my pet tortoise could have done it) onto an even more junior junior. I do remember signing a leaving card and donating a few left-over euros but I didn't connect the name on the brown envelope with my superb marketing spreadsheet.
This was some months ago. It now emerges that "junior junior" didn't understanding the first thing about Excel. Like most people in marketing, she thought it was some kind of clever add-on for PowerPoint (they use it to write faxes, for goodness sake) and she'd decided to get creative, entering data more or less randomly. My particular favourite? Entering one month's data into cells occupied by some of my most finely crafted formulae. The sheet, of course, got copied for the follow-on period complete with fixed numbers. Result? My carefully constructed links went "phut" and the model got more broken every month. No-one noticed until the new non-exec (qualified accountant, but allegedly former colleague of the chairman's wife) actually read the summary and the backing reports and started asking questions in the board meeting about why the numbers hadn't changed from one period to the next and always came out so nicely.
You can imagine the inter-departmental blame-storming session that followed. Marketing director blames FD, and my boss – loyal as ever –mutters something about pressure of month ends and it wouldn't happen again. Like it was our fault!
So now I'm left unpicking the spreadsheets
to see how many months the board have been reading nonsense – and how
many millions have to be wiped off the so-called brand values. There goes
another quiet period. I may even have
to do the reports myself every month, says the FD. If so, there will definitely
be no time to process marketing's expenses. At least not until I get a PowerPoint
presentation saying sorry...