Principles of Practice, Volume III
Marketing Operations
Five Seconds, and the Numbers That Rise as You Miss
Marketing is the delivery system. Messaging is what is delivered. Impressions, reach, engagement and sessions all measure the first and say nothing about the second, which is why a business can watch its numbers rise for years while nothing sells.
Pages.
Illustrations drawn for this volume.
Inches, paperback trim.
What Volume III covers
The four instruments that sit outside the reporting, because a measurement problem cannot be audited using the measurement that has the problem.
What peer reviewed research actually shows about attribution and where it stops being informative. Two attribution models run on identical data, and an optimum that was the reverse of both. The eBay experiment, and what a large share of attributed conversions turned out never to have been worth.
And one measured reason none of this gets fixed, drawn from studies of roughly twenty six million real accounts.
The argument
Marketing is the delivery system. Messaging is what is delivered.
Impressions, reach, engagement, followers, sessions and traffic all measure the delivery system. Not one of them carries any information about whether what arrived meant anything to the person it reached. That much is familiar.
What is not familiar is the second half. When a business aims its marketing at a cheaper tier of the market than its product, the delivery numbers do not merely fail to inform. They rise as the business drifts further from its buyer. The bottom sixty percent of any market is the largest tier and the cheapest to reach, so marketing built for it honestly produces more of everything a dashboard counts. Correct the aim and every number they were watching goes down. A falling number generates doubt and a rising one does not, so the failure produces no anomaly and no investigation.
What this book is not
It is not a book about analytics, attribution or data quality.
The instruments in it are accurate. The analytics in the case it opens with were correctly installed and the figures were right. Nothing was broken, and nobody inside had ever suspected anything.
The subject is what the instruments are pointed at. Attribution appears in Part III, and it is not the thesis.
Where it sits
Volume III maps to NBOP-CPM, the Marketing Operations endorsement. Volume I covers the core practice and maps to NBOP-CP. Volume II covers Integrated Operations and maps to NBOP-CPI.
Four of the six volumes are written. Volumes V and VI apply the standard inside the remaining endorsement niches and are still to come. All six are written before anything publishes.
Availability
Written, not yet published No price, no purchase link and no ISBN until the listing exists.
Reading this is not a way to pass
Purchase is not required and confers no advantage.
The assessment is built from the published standard, not from this book. It is a way to learn the work. The standard is free to read in full before you pay anything.