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April 16, 2007

Comments

Jean-Marie Le Ray

Hi Victor,

Here is the translation : http://adscriptum.blogspot.com/2007/05/gym-une-analyse_10.html#2007/05/gym-une-analyse_10.html#Indicateurs
Thanks again. Kind regards,

Jean-Marie

Jean-Marie Le Ray

Thanks very much, Victor, I'll let you know when it'll be done.
Jean-Marie

Victor Cook

Jean-Marie,

I am delighted you would like to publish a French translation of this post on your blog. Please feel free to do so. And thank you for your kind words too!

~V

Jean-Marie Le Ray

Absolutely brilliant! Would you authorize me to translate it into French to publish on my blog? It's a translation lab for French speaking people.
Best regards,
Jean-Marie Le Ray

Jonathan Knowles

I think this is a compelling analysis of the relative efficiency of enterprise marketing spend. For too long, SG&A and R&D have been treated as "overhead" or "a necessary cost of doing business" - just the act of treating them as "marketing spend" encourages a more demanding mindset about the benefits that these types of spending are meant to generate.
Peter Drucker said that "only marketing and innovation create value" so it is great to see someone doing this kind of analysis on how much revenue and value is being generated for each dollar invested in SG&A and R&D.
On the specifics of the Microsoft situation, it is clear that Microsoft has lower efficiency of marketing spend than Google - but then I suspect so do 95% or more of US businesses (Vic - perhaps you could run the analysis on where Google ranks on EME within the S&P 500?). I am not saying this to excuse Microsoft, but just to suggest that a mature business (and many parts of Microsoft's business are mature even if paid search is not one of them) may find it hard to have an EME ratio that diverges significantly from the mean for its peer set.
Vic - perhaps you can offer some insight into what constitutes excellence in EME in more mature industries? If my revenue growth is above the industry average and my EME ratio is 95% of the industry average, am I a star?? Or does it need to be 90%? 80%?
Thank you for your insight.

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