“I know half of my advertising budget is wasted; I just don’t know which half.”

Business folk have a way of talking nonsense sometimes, they really do.

Has anybody ever actually said this after having dedicated some thinking time to it?

Think about it now. It’s quite an admission for a business person to knowingly burn 50 per cent of any investment.

“Morning Mr Chairman, great news. That £5m machine we wanted – I’ve got two. Not to worry, I’ll chuck one of ’em away soon. Which one? Oh I dunno, but half of our investments are always wasted.”

It’s a short trip from there to the hotel with the soft white walls, I’m afraid.

It makes no sense in any other area of business, so why allow it with marketing budget?

The problem lies in the evaluation. You buy a machine to serve a purpose, to do something for you. Otherwise you wouldn’t have bought it.

You buy some advertisements, invest in public relations activities, create a brochure, launch a website – do you know what you want them to do? And if you do, do you know how you are going to measure success?

New enquiries? Sales? Friendly smiles in the street? Your pub pals winding you up? All these are measurable benefits. So what’s keeping you from measuring?

Press cuttings are a good example. It’s tricky to apply monetary value to a press cutting – but that’s OK, because we have a rule of thumb - how much it would have cost to advertise in the same space (usually accompanied by a multiplier for positive news).

But absolute figures have value too. OTS is a good measure – opportunities to see. The OTS of the item you are reading is around 80,000 – 80,000 people (the approximate readership) have a chance to see this story, and therefore have a chance to act on it.

No story – no OTS, absolutely no chance to respond. And if we know that, for example, 1 per cent of readers responded to our last advertisement, and what they spent, then we could say how much value the ad brought us. None of this ‘which half?’ woolly nonsense.

There is another marketing quote that seems to be gaining popularity, despite the fact it is attributed to Bill Gates.

“If I was down to my last dollar, I’d spend it on public relations.”

The point being that if you don’t tell people what you sell, they can’t buy it.

But don’t waste half of your marketing budget there either. Think it through, use your experience, use the expertise of others – make calculated assessments, not barmy guesses.

I keep saying it, but it really is all in the planning.