It’s a little off topic, but now you’ve got me curious. If you wanted to price a P&G;campaign around Business Outcomes, how would you price the campaign? What metrics are P&G;trying to measure? Presumably sales, but how do you correlate pricing/value of a specific online social campaign to an offline product (especially when there are probably numerous advertising channels, and on and offline social networks running simultaneously)? P&G;is into collecting Connectors and Mavens, but that would be some serious Data Mining project trying to determine which housewife’s blog, Vocalpoint member, facebook friend or healthcare professional is the most influential in their physical or virtual neighborhood, by how much, and did your campaign sign them up (or did you sign up the friend of the friend of the person in question). Without any immediate or easily correlatable actions to a social campaign, aren’t you forced back to charging by CPM, project or hour instead of by Business Outcome?

Measurement and the use of metrics has been a big part of running a business since Taylor (and in the minds of business leaders, for a long time before that). My feeling is that Marketing Departments lost the plot and the imperatives over the years, as Finance and Operations got more power and did their efficiency and effectiveness bit better. Marketing, like Cinderella was left behind to do the cleaning (and run marketing campaigns). Lester's Prince Charming contribution for Direct was really the ball. After a long hiatus, the slippers are now finding the feet. [The above contributions shows a data/metrics person in a "creatives" role, using metaphor and analogy where a bunch of charts and tables would fail]. Tom.

I like that -- the slippers finding the feet....time for the Princess to bloom