How Should I Spend $20,000?

I know what you’re thinking, but this is a real and frustrating problem in my life. My job–the one I drive to an office and wear makeup for–is to persuade people to change a particular set of behaviors. One of the ways we try to do this is by spending money on advertising–radio, TV, newspapers, billboards, online banner ads, and the like–that will reach our target audience. Every year I sit down with some coworkers and decide where we will spend our advertising budget. And every year I am clueless.

We’ve done our homework. We know our audience–who they are, what they respond to, what media they use. We can make some pretty good guesses about where we should put our money. But I want to know how we’ll know if it worked.

It’s messy experiment. Every year we change a lot of things–the tone and content of our ads, the media mix we invest in, how much money we spend, and what additional outreach activities we engage in beyond paid advertising.  I’ve spent a lot of hours discussing ponderously complicated evaluation schemes with wonky bureaucrats and university-types. If we’re lucky, we can document improvements in behavior from year to year, but we can’t trace those changes back to particular outreach techniques. Which would be a nice thing to be able to do, because then we could put our time and money into the things that work and forget about all the other stuff.

It is tempting to write off the whole question as hopelessly complex, except for one thing: our colleagues in the business world make these kinds of decisions all the time. And if they get them wrong there are real consequences. What do they know that we don’t?