CMOs and CFOs aren’t known for having the most harmonious relations.
Marketing folks are all about sizzle reels and impressions counts, while the finance folks are focused on the bottom line.
But CMOs who prioritize performance metrics can be “best friends” with their CFO, said DeLu Jackson, chief marketing and communications officer at home alarm system brand ADT, speaking at CTV Connect in New York City on Thursday.
Moving away from traditional metrics
For example, Jackson and his team track a bespoke metric called “marketing cost per installation” that measures the impact of media on what ADT cares most about: the roughly 1 million alarms its technicians install every year.
Sales are important to ADT, obviously, but the brand’s relationship with its customers doesn’t truly begin until after an installation. Because even after a sale, a customer might cancel or delay.
Marketing cost per installation is now ADT’s “primary currency for decision-making,” Jackson said. “We’ve moved away from traditional media metrics.”
Applying a performance mindset to its media spending has also helped ADT expand its marketing program to new partners, placements and channels.
“We’ve been growing our funnel, because we can see the audiences, the audience type, the response and the timing of the impact,” Jackson said. “We’ve identified that we can reach our core audience at a good level, but also bring in a ton of new potential customers.”
New horizons
But when Jackson joined ADT in 2021, the brand was still spending heavily on linear TV to reach its core audience of mostly affluent people in their mid-50s and early 60s from very specific geographic areas.
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To reach a younger audience, ADT experimented with new channels and upped its frequency.
“Linear TV was working fine for us, for our traditional buyers,” Jackson said. “But the next generation of buyers were using ecommerce, search, Amazon – all of these different ways to discover … so we had to show up in those places.”
Add streaming to that list, too, of course.
In May, ADT chose Horizon Media as its media agency of record, and the two devised a plan “to get off of linear,” said Bob Lord, president of Horizon Media Holdings.
The goal was to “repurpose dollars and get to CTV,” Lord said.
And they did. As of June, ADT’s split between linear and CTV was around 70% to 30%. By the end of the year, ADT was spending nearly 80% of the allotted budget on streaming.
“It was a fairly dramatic shift very quickly,” Jackson said, but the change was needed. ADT started with a few tests, he said, and quickly saw “great results in terms of delivery.”
“But we also saw it in our business results: more leads and more demand turning into more sales and actual installations,” he said. “Our metrics were all moving in the right direction.”
The takeaway? Change can be hard, but you’ve gotta be where your customers are.
