Marketing effectiveness measurement: the destination is clear but we need to change direction
Opinion
If we persist in chasing the ‘guaranteed outcomes’ being touted by the ad tech industry, we will get what we deserve. There is another way, writes Nick Manning.
Most parents who drive will sometimes hear one plaintive question from the back seats, “Are we there yet?” To which the answer is invariably “no”, especially when you’ve barely left home, and it’s a two-hour journey.
It seems that we’ve also been on a very long trip when it comes to the measurement of marketing effectiveness, especially as our SatNav has taken us on the worst route possible, and still is.
We can get ‘there’ if we choose the right destination and go straight to it.
Marketing Week recently reported that 71% of marketers think there is an internal disconnection between the marketing team and other parts of the business about the meaning of ‘effectiveness’.
Only 26% report ‘shared language’ being used to communicate marketing success (or lack of it) within their companies.
According to a US survey, CEO confidence in the CMO role has dropped significantly.
Unsurprisingly, marketers find it hard to secure budget because they cannot convince the people who control the purse strings that marketing makes a significant contribution to business growth.
So, marketing budgets get capped, short-term performance and promotional tactics are used instead, and the downward spiral continues.
Thus, the world continues to tell itself that ‘fishing with cheap rods‘ is better than using an expensive net, even though it knows there’s a lot of waste and crime in the polluted sea and the designer net is exactly what is needed.
The reality is that many companies are missing out on growth because their main drivers are misreported or not measured at all, leading them to underinvest.
You can’t optimise what you don’t measure, and in an interconnected eco-system of influence, getting it right is three-dimensional.
Where measurement does exist, it is often of the wrong elements and measured incorrectly, especially when back boxes and Walled Gardens handle the analytics.
The pages of The Media Leader have been festooned with different perspectives on this conundrum. David Wilding talked up the latest Go Big or Go Home research from the IPA, not to mention Profitability 2, the Thinkbox-led study that combined WPP case studies with Ebiquity’s.
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Paul Evans wrote about the much-trumpeted ‘Outcomes Era’ and correctly repeats a message that should already be standard: the purpose of advertising is impact and effectiveness, not just hitting the nearest and easiest target.
Paul is also right to say that “outcomes without transparency are not outcomes”, only apparent effects that can’t be properly verified.
Outcomes: The industry’s current favourite word is also its biggest positioning mistake
However, the sentence “outcomes are the destination” can mislead. It can potentially make the problem worse because ‘outcomes’ from advertising don’t solve the true problem of proving the effectiveness of marketing, and only measure a small fraction of it.
Worse still, the all-singing, all-dancing black boxes being marketed by the platforms will reinforce the definition of success in terms of unaccountable, short-term measures.
The holding companies’ equivalents will be more broadly based, but they won’t extend across the whole marketing spectrum and will be ‘proprietary’, usually shorthand for impossible to verify.
The Media Leader also reported recently on comments by Simon Michaelides, the director general of ISBA, at the recent DTG Summit.
Simon, who should know, talked about the “dilution of marketing knowledge at brands and a poor understanding at the boardroom level of how marketing really works”.
His conclusion was that CFOs (and therefore CEOs) “don’t like deduced, correlated, inferred results. They are looking for hard facts”.
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What should the future of marketing effectiveness look like?
The way ahead was presented at the Advertising: Who Cares? October 2025 summit.
It was the culmination of a nine-month discussion among a team of experts around the world, and the exam question was “what should the future of marketing effectiveness look like?” And how should companies use the results?
This was a subset of a broader debate about how industry business models should be transformed. The group included top experts in the modelling of marketing effectiveness.
We analysed the relevant questions from multiple angles and defined the right destination and the best way to get there.
The solution is to prove that marketing tangibly increases a business’s value. That is everyone’s objective and is especially relevant to the budget approvers.
Obviously, most businesses have value, and it’s a multiple of profit, so our job is to increase profit and improve the multiple.
It is not just to acquire customers at a low cost or increase the video completion rate, to choose two random ‘outcomes’.
The success of marketing in driving higher net profit at higher margins should be measured by a unified set of metrics that demonstrate the true incremental impact of the whole of marketing.
This should embrace organic and paid channels, especially now that the former are vital cogs in the engine.
Naturally, it should include the effects of price, promotion, distribution and so on, inter-correlated. It should also include the vital longer-term effects of selling that extra tube of toothpaste or packet of biscuits, not just insurance policies, and not just today’s value.
Obviously, it should analyse the effect of the messaging, not just the ‘creative’, but the best combination of images and words in the relevant channels via testing.
In short, it should show the real net uplift in business results and how it translates into the business’s value.
It also enhances the business’s value when it’s clear that marketing can achieve that goal, rather than being a cost that can’t be quantified.
Yes, some conclusions will be ‘deduced, correlated and inferred’, but they will be robust and grounded in a complete analysis of the main drivers of marketing performance.
There seems to be no other way to convince the decision-makers to invest more capital in marketing than in other options.
After all, marketing investment can be scaled up quickly, whereas building a factory takes time. We need to make marketing the natural choice by showing how it compares to others.
And this goes beyond advertising.
Rosé-tinted glasses
The ad industry is obsessed with itself and spends vast amounts of time on small aspects of the advertising process, as a visit to the Croisette will confirm.
No doubt a lively debate over the acquisition of LiveRamp by Publicis will accompany the rosé-tinted glasses, but serious discussions regarding marketing effectiveness will be confined to the darkness of the Palais-at best.
Back in the real world, the range of elements influencing people is wider than ever, and a key role for advertising is to make them all work harder.
It is vital to measure the individual and collective effects of each as WARC has done in its research on the multiplicative effect of advertising, but this needs to go further into marketing effect.
Of course, none of this is rocket science or new, but we’ve been going the scenic route to the wrong place, and the latest ‘Outcomes Era’ rhetoric (much of which is ad tech sales speak) distracts us from the right path.
Course correction
We need to course-correct, look beyond the myopia of paid advertising, and get back to business.
So, can this be done and, if so, how?
The Advertising: Who Cares? team proposed a number of measures, including the following:
* The various stakeholders involved across the whole marketing spectrum and associated parties (e.g., product and price) should have one hard business metric: the successful delivery of new incremental business growth that builds profit, margin, and business value.
This is a shared, natural objective that drives the actual profit that rewards those who deliver it, so it should become self-financing.
* A new data framework that analyses all the vital contributing factors to marketing effect and the inter-dependence between them, showing correlation and cause and effect.
This framework, called ‘The Six Foundations of Marketing Effectiveness Modelling’, was created by David Beaton and Stewart Pearson. It aims to analyse the full marketing spectrum in ways that contribute to increases in business valuation.
This is along the lines described by Beaton in his article in The Media Leader a year ago, but it goes further than Marketing Mix Modelling in its purest form.
* A new organisational and operational structure for advertisers that brings together internal team members from each discipline (not just marketing) around shared objectives and the data analytics framework.
Companies should ideally organise themselves to remove the silos that get in the way of unified marketing and its measurement, a key cause of fragmented marketing effectiveness analytics and where ‘outcomes’ thrive as a metric.
This may not be feasible for everyone, but a unified data framework can still be adopted.
* The employment of outside parties, including agencies, should dovetail with the company’s structure, objectives and reward systems. This, in effect, means paying partners for results, based on those results, on a split-risk basis.
The concept of ‘payment by results’ remains a thorny one, even if we have substituted ‘outcomes’. The only result that matters is net incremental profit uplift, so why not reward everyone for that out of the proceeds?
At the Advertising Who Cares? conference, Caroline Johnson of The Business Model Company showed examples of initiatives that agencies can adopt to increase their value, including the sharing of risk and reward along these lines.
A new data framework without the necessary organisational and operational changes will only be a partial solution, and the best results will come from execution of the whole programme.
None of these moves described here is easy, and there are no silver bullets, but the obstacles can be overcome with the right kind of approach, led from a strategic business standpoint.
Self-interested industry players will go in the opposite direction towards a different destination.
Our proposed solution is about as far from the sort of ‘outcomes’ being touted in our industry as it is possible to get, and if we persist in chasing the ‘guaranteed outcomes’ being touted by the ad tech industry, we will get what we deserve.
So, to the question “are we there yet?”, the answer is “no, not yet”, but we can be ‘there’ if we define where it is and set course in the right direction, with no more diversions and delays.
During Cannes week, it is easy to get seduced into the ad industry world of Lions and ad tech, so it’s timely that Publicis has reminded us that it’s about business results.
It would be even better if all the Holding Companies banged the same drum, but rather than touting a black box that promises ‘outcomes’, they should help their clients unify their marketing components and analytics to deliver those results.
Santé!
Nick Manning is the co-founder of Manning Gottlieb Media (now MG OMD) and was chief strategy officer at Ebiquity for over a decade. He now owns a mentoring business, Encyclomedia, which offers strategic advice to companies in the media and advertising industries, and is the non-executive chair of Media Marketing Compliance.