Correspondence: Michel Sara, ROI/Marketing, 47, rue de Chaillot, Paris 75116, France. Tel: +33 1 7274 8297; Fax: +33 1 4720 3746; e-mail: msara@r-o-i-marketing.com

¹is an MBA graduate from the MIT Sloan School of Management. He has 18 years of professional experience, mainly consulting in marketing and communications for Fortune 500 companies. He held several management functions in major communication agencies, ending up as Managing Director of J. Walter Thompson France. Since 2002, he has concentrated his expertise in the area of marketing effectiveness by joining as a partner in the leading auditing company in the field, Integration Marketing & Communications Limited ('Integration'), and has contributed to the penetration of its core product, the Market Contact Audit — MCA — amongst global advertisers. He has supervised around 60 audits in major categories and regions. He is now offering end-to-end expertise in Marketing Accountability around the MCA platform, with the purpose of helping corporations further down the implementation path.

Received 16 May 2007; Revised 16 May 2007.

Abstract

The paper's aim is to introduce an approach to implement Accountability in Marketing Communications (Marcoms). The measurement platform is based on the MCA™ methodology, which stands for Market Contact Audit™. MCA is category and market specific and provides a universal metric — a common currency — to measure the effectiveness of a brand's diverse Marcoms initiatives from the consumers' perspective. This approach helps to address the following questions:

• How to have simple and operational KPIs for the marketing function at the enterprise level?
• How to help Marcoms practitioners work across silos and across the various communication disciplines?
• How to increase the impact of Marcoms without increasing their cost?