Marketing Costs

[brique]

Useful to remember that while spending pushes CI up, other factors will push it down : cancel/punctuality rates can really hurt CI if they get out of hand : certain regions have winter weather issues causing high cancels for that reason : age/maint issues on your fleet can cause a rise in cancels : so, worth keeping an eye on if CI starts wobbling.

other thing : Route-specific campaigns also seem to push CI up : so, if you have a batch of those end, CI may drop back a bit.

My own experience of cancelling marketing is that it always seems to take a higher spend to get back any falls: after 9/11 I reduced marketing budget to keep the books balanced, CI dropped 20 points very fast : re-introducing the former % spend has only regained 10 points, where it has stalled since.

[Curse]

I think I'm a bit nearer to my idea of what the problem is.


Since I started AWS I felt it's always a good move to start many campaigns early. With these "starters" I was able to go up to CI 100 with only four campaigns.

Deleting the existing and adding one or two big instead always decreased my CI. My CI also decreased when I added a big one, waited a week to establish it and delete the old ones after.


In my current game I had three CI drops. From CI 97, from CI 95 and from CI 92. I never touched the marketing panel since the fourth campaign was installed years bevor and although my airline expanded massively, I think I will make it to CI 100 (again) with this. And I know if I delete one of them and add a much bigger one, the result would be a massive decrease.



So, I'm not the only one with exactly this thoughts and experiences. There must be somewhere a glitch in the algorithm or whatever, either old campaigns aren't less effective when the airline growths or new ones aren't effective enough.

I could imagine this to be a feature like "an old campaing makes people know exactly it's the campaing of airline XY while a new campaing needs to establish itself with more money", but honestly this would be an odd feature.

[brique]

Interesting thoughts on the 'old campaign' being more effective angle : made me think along these lines : When you start your campaigns at game-start : you get more bang-per-buck as your company is so small, so your early CI growth comes rather cheaply : as you grow, the marketing budget grows too until your marketing spend hits the 'stall point' for that level of spend.

So, if you cancel a campaign, perhaps you lose that 'cheap' CI you got early on, when you were smaller, and getting it back means spending at the higher level needed now your company is so much bigger for that level of CI. Its a % thing, and the same % of a bigger company is a lot more $$$ of spend per CI point now, than when you first 'earned' them...

As to the idea of new campaigns needing to spend more due to unfamiliarity with the campaign itself; thats actually a fair point : imagine if Intel changed their signature 'tune' : currently, you hear it and know its 'Intel inside' without even seeing it : a new 'tune' would have to be really pushed hard to get the same instant recognition. So maybe not so odd.... just.... deep 

[Curse]

Yeah, that's what I meant. Thanks for translating it into something shorter and better understandable. Native language advance I see.

Here's a screenshot of the marketing campaigns I have. (game started 1st Feb 1985, now is 15th Jan 1988) They brought me up to 95+ CI and I'd swear it would have gone higher if I hadn't missed to get some new staff.


I put also a temporariy (1 month, whole world, everything to click - an additional $9.5 Million Dollar per week!) campaign to it once, the increase was a higher (2% instead of ~1%) and when it was done, it still increases. So temporary campaigns don't seem to affect my thesis.

[brique]

I'm only running a local small-scale outfit, with a single competed route, so I dont really need a massive CI anyway : but keeping marketing spend at about 10% of revenue did push it up to CI50 rather painlessly. I then opened a base and that really lit a fuse on it : spend went to about 15% and CI flew up to 70 in no time at all. Would have to factor in the big batch of RI spends on the new routes as well though. But even when they ended, the CI stayed around the 70 mark fine.

9/11 did throw things out, I cut marketing spend and even putting it back hasnt got CI above 60 since. Which is fine for my operation, getting it any higher would only be an ego thing : nice to do but I'd rather spend the $$$ getting the fleet in shape to last until game-end.

I think the way to go is add campaigns as you grow, keeping your old ones running and let the 'inflation' increase their spend : and, avoid cancelling them : maybe using temp campaigns is the way to control marketing spend, renewing or not as funds dictate but not hurting your underlying gains from early cheap spending?

[LemonButt]

I was poking around the bug reports to see what was updated etc. and found this topic I started in 2012.  Obviously all those airlines are gone now although I assume that data is archived somewhere.

My further input on "fixing" this bug, which re-reading everything seems to be more of a quirk or gotcha in terms of requiring advanced knowledge of how the marketing campaigns work, would be to marketing more strategic/declarative versus tactical/imperative.

Right now most decisions in the game are strategy vs. tactical (not to be confused with tedious vs. not tedious) with the exception of marketing.  Marketing today means deciding tactics, throwing money at it, and seeing what comes out the other end.  To make this more strategic/declarative I think what needs to happen is that airlines set their target CI and then marketing expenses/campaigns/etc. are calculated based on the desired outcome (same with RI where once you hit the target RI the campaign ends, actually making these campaigns viable).  So instead of an airline adding additional campaigns and tinkering with the settings, you simply put in I want to have a CI of 50 and it says your expenses will be X and your marketing team will be doing Y campaigns.  Thus, the campaigns are an output versus an input.  As the "CEO" of an airline, I want to set strategy and desired outcomes--whether they are running Facebook Ads, buying billboards, or otherwise I don't care as long as I get to to my 50 CI goal.  There would be a similar setup for alliances where they pick their target CI boost for members for the marketing expense.

To my knowledge this is still a "bug" but with this fix would be more of a feature request...

[knobbygb]

same with RI where once you hit the target RI the campaign ends

Is that a thing?  I've never seen it - selecting a target RI I mean, even as a seasoned player. What am I missing?