The Magic Toolkit

The future value of present spend

Here’s a free tool fresh from the IPA conference to help you huddle with finance and come up with the greatest possible 2025!

Finance aren’t the baddies. They care about doing the best for the business, perhaps even more than you do. But they get so many business cases for spending the company’s money and it’s a task to prioritise all the options.

When you put forward your marketing plan, finance has to decide whether that’s a better use of the money than something else.

Our new tool is here to help you both out. It uses a framework that finance love – called discounted cashflow – to make it super easy to compare a media plan to an R&D project, or a new factory.

Depending on your category, media mix and creative quality, it gives you an estimate of expected revenue over the next three years and accounts for cashflows in the future being worth less than today.

It then compares against another investment of your choice. Just work with finance – they don’t bite – to input the expected return and risk level and let the tool do the rest.

So click on the image or follow this link: https://comparethecashflow.magicnumbers.co.uk/ to give it a go, and let us know how you get on!

Keep scrolling down to watch a “how to use” tutorial and download the slide deck from the IPA conference.

 

 

Spend Selector

Free and simple online tool to help you use Econometrics/MMM!

I love Econometrics/MMM. Not in that cringey way you see on CVs, where people claim a passion for work to impress a future boss. But it in an unabashed, geeky, I know it’s not cool but I can’t help it, way.

It’s just a brilliant tool for learning how the world works using data. And it solves all the well-known problems with last-click attribution. And it doesn’t need 3rd party cookies.

I want everyone to be able to use it in 2025, so, with the team at magic numbers I’ve made a tool that will help you use it during annual planning.

It does 2 things:1. Is for smaller businesses – the tool tells you if you’re ready for econometrics/MMM, by assessing whether you’re spending enough to get a good read with this method.

2. Is if you’re already using econometrics/MMM and experimenting with new media channels. The tool tells you how much you need to spend on that channel for econometrics/MMM to give you a good read.

Give it a go here: https://spend-selector.magicnumbers.co.uk/. If you have any questions or thoughts, you can contact us here.We didn’t write a manual yet, but we’re here to support you as you get stuck in.

So you gave it a try and have some stonking data to use, but you need to know what to do next. My course Data Works covers all the different avenues you can take after using this tool and even uses this in the homework.

 

Recovery budget planner

The recovery budget planner, built by us at magic numbers and sponsored by ITV Adlabs, is a little web based app that exists to help marketers justify budget requests via a solid set of projections that show how the investment is going to deliver money results.

The tool takes your budget plans and combines them with scenarios for what competitors might do. It then uses the share of voice, share of market rule pictured below, to predict your likely market share change.

The next step is to combine the predicted market share with economists’ forecasts of how big your category will be, to get a figure for the additional turnover and profit your budget will deliver.

Trying different scenarios enables you to identify the budget that’s needed to reach targets if all goes well – the economy doesn’t tip into recession, and media prices don’t get too high.

You can also stress test these scenarios, to see if you’ll still reach targets in different, perhaps dicier, versions of the future.

This kind of wargaming isn’t everyone’s cup of tea, and you do need to collect a bit of data about what’s happened so far.

So, find a planner in your team or media agency, or, failing that, someone you know who’s usually good with spreadsheets.

They’ll get stuck in, and before you know it, you’ll be marching into budgeting conversations with the CFO, board, or investors fully kitted out with the business case you need for an stonking 2025.

You can navigate to the app here, or to read more about it, follow this link: https://magicnumbers.co.uk/articles/recovery-budget-planner-resources/#

To help you use the app, you can download the user guide  or watch the 11 minute video below that takes you through an example.

If you need further help, there’s an FAQ at the end of the user guide, but you can also get in touch with us, we’ll be happy to help.