It’s jargon gone ballistic. You hear so much ROI – and IMHO see so little ! Sure , it’s practically impossible to determine the returns from your Marcom spend in the finance /accounting sense of the term (= net profit / investment , and on a Net Present Value basis at that strictly speaking !). But then as it is a finance/accounting term with a specific and well defined meaning , why not use another ? Or at least why not use it less indiscriminately?
Recently I came across an ‘ROI’ report for a sponsorship produced by an agency that specializes in the stuff. It turned out to be essentially a savings statement which gave the % discount off rate card costs after assigning weights to specific components of the exposures. A very good savings statement . But ROI ?
It’d be ROI – if the end objective were to buy media space !
A bit like calculating the returns from your stocks as the savings on brokerage ?
Meanwhile , an excellent The Economist special report on the gaming industry
Cheers 
