The first issue of the magazine "Anuncios" was published on November 24th 1980. Today, converted into one of the reference publications of the Spanish advertising sector, it celebrates its 40th anniversary with a special issue in which it summarizes its four decades and where the most prominent professionals of the advertising industry share the most decisive moment of their career.
José María Cuende, CEO of CUENDE Infometrics, shared with the readers of "Anuncios" this article that we reproduce:
We want to be rich
From the beginning it was clear to us, the objective of the limited company founded in 1991 by two Cuendes was the consultancy to optimize the advertising management.
We felt like real Jedis, defenders of the wisdom and light of advertising knowledge. We developed an argument in which each presentation the attendees did not stop shaking their heads affirmatively, they were interested and we accumulated acceptance until we invariably received a resounding and incomprehensible NO.
Advertisers, media agencies and the media congratulated us on our approach, applauded the type of analysis we were proposing... but they didn't hire us. We went so far as to turn the presentations into micro-seminars, but they still weren't interested in buying our services.
After a year of failures we started to suffer the Sisyphus syndrome but we kept on trying, it was in Barcelona after an intense presentation to an important food company, when the general manager stood up, approached me and putting a hand on my shoulder, with great kindness he congratulated me and added: "Look Cuende, we don't pretend to be wise we just want to be rich", he shook my hand tightly and left us in full Epiphany, at last the mystery was revealed to us! Suddenly we understood that the clients needed "operational" help, not "advice". When they asked us their doubts and questions they were really asking for... METRICS!
We immediately applied ourselves to transform "concepts" into "data", observation into research and speeches into graphs. We even changed the name of CUENDE ASOCIADOS to the more appropriate CUENDE INFOMETRICS,
From that moment on, success measurement systems were born, such as MIRO (OOH campaign effectiveness), INSUMO (Purchase intention tracking), GEOMEX (OOH audiences in Spain), METRICOOH (OOH audiences in other countries).
According to Master Yoda: If you haven't made any mistakes and you're still losing, you should play a different game.
