I just finished a pretty interesting post-dinner discussion with my fiance, who is, suffice it to say, a bit disappointed in some of the “lavish” events that bailout companies have held in recent months.

I’m really not sure where I stand on all of this stuff - and to be honest, I desperately want to separate the political from the business-oriented stuff.  I’m not really interested in discussing specific examples.  What I am interested in is how the general public reaction may actually affect marketing people and the industry itself.

(For the record, my fiance delivered the quote of the week during our conversation - pointing out that people who attend parties that are sponsored by companies that have accepted bailout funds are, in fact, “drinking the bailout”.)

But what I pointed out, in all seriousness, was that a lot of these “sponsorship” opportunities, lavish parties, and corporate events might be legitimate marketing activities that benefit a company’s brand, visibility, or they might even deliver leads and drive customer acquisition.

This points to a bigger problem, though.  The vast majority of the population reacts in outrage largely because they’re not willing to acknowledge that corporate events and general marketing shenanigans may actually have an ROI.  Therein lies the problem: marketing still has not learned the language needed to explain the value of all of the seemingly excessive spending on their initiatives.

How do you explain to the general public that the sponsorship of a sporting event, and all the parties and affairs that your name is attached to during this event, is actually really important for building awareness for your products and services?  And to make this even more frustrating - how do you explain this to the general public when you struggle to explain it to your CEO?

I think there’s something useful brewing here.  If Congress, the general public, and a variety of other interested parties are persistent in pressuring these companies to explain themselves, we might just find a breakthrough in conveying the value of marketing in a concise and meaningful way.

That’s not to say that absolutely no marketing person out there can explain the value of marketing, but rather, the act of explaining it to the population at-large is a better litmus test for our ability to explain the value of what we do.

Yes, measurement and ROI is getting better and easier each day because of the growing set of quality tools and best practices made available to us, but that doesn’t mean that we’re measuring the right things.  And to take that a step further - measurement is not the issue I’m interested in here.  What I’m saying is that measurement and analytics is not the only thing you need if you’re trying to successfully demonstrate value - it only tells part of the story, and we may never be able to adequately measure engagement in the same way as traffic on your web site.  This issue I care about is that many (or maybe most) marketing, PR and advertising people still stumble all over themselves when they are asked to demonstrate the value of what they do!

Enough for now - but I am eager to see how some of these companies react to accusations in future incidents - because there will certainly be a lot to learn from the most effective of these explanations - and I do expect the best of them to be hybrids of hard data and broader language.