New thinking, not new analogies, are needed to sell quality media amid an economic storm
Opinion
The effectiveness case hasn’t failed. It’s just stopped being the right answer to the question clients are actually asking amid an international energy crisis, argues Omar Oakes.
Why is the UK one of the most overweight countries in the developed world? Did we all collectively forget that vegetables exist?
Maybe simple problems have difficult answers. Although you wouldn’t know it when hearing the endless, ever-more-creative ways of describing ‘the big problem’ in media and advertising today: effectiveness.
Despite all the research flying out of the IPA, media agencies, Thinkbox and countless other places, the gap between what the evidence shows and what clients do only seems to widen.
Just as with an obesity crisis, advertisers seem hooked on the short-term sugar highs of performance media when they should be investing more in quality, sustainable channels.
The Bob Hoffmans of the world would have you believe that marketers are, frankly, too stupid to understand this idea, despite it being repeated as gospel in every opinion piece and trade conference over the last decade.
Maybe it’s time to accept that advertisers are increasingly operating under a brief where the effectiveness argument was never the right conversation to begin with.
This has happened before
When classified advertising collapsed, the obituaries blamed the internet: Craigslist, Facebook Marketplace, Google Search. Digital ‘disruption’ was the most convenient explanation.
But look at what the advertisers were actually buying before they left. Was it really editorial “quality”, or was it rather the newspaper’s authority, its readership, and its trusted environment? Something which used to be taken for granted before the rise of “brand safety”, which I’m sorry to report is still in popular usage since the last edition of this column.
Advertisers were buying the only flexible, reversible, cost-efficient distribution tool available at the time, so much so that in 2005 “press” gobbled up 45% of all UK adspend, according to AA/WARC figures. 45%!
But when a better vessel appeared, the bundle collapsed instantly. Because, despite all the browbeating about supporting news and quality journalism, there was no loyalty to ‘press’ — only to the function it had been performing.
The advertisers now rotating spend toward Google and Meta are making the same decision the classified advertiser made in 2005. They’re buying the most flexible, measurable, reversible distribution tool available. Under a brief that was never about brand value to begin with.
The analogy isn’t the problem
Our industry has spent a decade or more treating this as a persuasion problem. We need better analogies! Newer data! More vivid case studies!
“Good marketing is like compound interest.” “Good marketing is like going to the gym.”
Or nutrition.
There is, you likely already know, an actual IPA book called Eat Your Greens.
The opening lines of that book, published in 2018, are the same argument you will hear at every advertising event for your entire career.
This industry relies on short-term metrics, as they produce instant feedback. But we seem to have forgotten that the business of building brands is also a long game. It is one thing to measure whether someone has clicked on your ad, but the true effect of advertising is something you might have to wait several years for to effectuate.”
Last week, at a Media Futures Market event, Ebiquity’s Emily Weldon put this argument in terms our Gen-Z friends would understand: getting buff. Or “hench”, as we used to say in Norf London.
“Imagine going to the gym. You don’t see results after one session — effort is an investment. When someone puts in cheap, half-hearted effort, you don’t get the results.”
The analogies are clever and work. But they’re failing because they’re answering a question that a growing number of clients have stopped asking.
Why the brief is changing and won’t change back
This laboured effectiveness argument has conditions: a client who is optimising for growth, thinking in years, not quarters, with the organisational latitude to make a brand investment that won’t show returns in the next reporting cycle.
Be honest: is this really how most companies, even the largest ones, behave?
If you’re a commercial director who walks into a pitch armed with reach, context, trust, and long-term brand value, you’d better be sure you’re answering the brief that’s actually in the room. No analogy will save you if you’re not. Even one armed with newer and more granular data.
Instead of coming up with better analogies, it’s time to ask a different question. Particularly now, when real forces will put this orthodoxy under even greater strain.
The first is macroeconomic
Whatever you think about the Iran War, we are now in a global energy crisis, according to the International Energy Agency.
Ballooning energy costs mean revised growth forecasts, tightened CFO discretion, and tighter planning horizons.
When a CFO is staring at a revised forecast, the marketing budget is not a sacred cow. It’s a lever that will be pulled further toward measurability, flexibility, and reversibility.
The second is structural
The cohort of businesses built entirely on performance logic — direct-to-consumer brands, app-first companies, platform-native advertisers — has grown enormously over the past decade.
These businesses did not abandon brand investment under pressure. They never had a brand investment logic to begin with; they were built on short cycles, measurable returns, and spend that can be turned on and off like a tap.
Yes, some will grow to a point where they need to graduate to more sophisticated marketing. But for every Monzo, there will be thousands of small DTC brands buying direct from platforms without any awareness that an effectiveness conversation is even taking place.
The third is institutional
Marketing budgets are increasingly owned or co-owned by procurement, not CMOs, which, by definition, optimises for cost reduction.
A room where procurement has the final say is a room where the effectiveness argument faces a different burden of proof than the one it was built for. The IPA’s research won’t pierce a procurement brief built around pricing grids and fee commitments.
But procurement didn’t create this problem alone. As Lumen Research’s Mike Follett put it at the same event: “The reason that media planning is so poor is that the tools we use funnel investment in ways that suit platforms but don’t suit advertisers.”
The tools built the habits; the habits built the briefs. By the time procurement arrived to lock them in, the decision had already been made somewhere else.
The commercial director who treats this as a cycle to ‘wait out’ is making the same mistake as the newspaper that assumed the classified advertisers were coming back.
Ask a different question first
The question we face in the coming future is not how to make the effectiveness case more compelling. It’s ‘Is the effectiveness case the right conversation to be having at all?’
A client running a growth brief is a client you can sell to. The analogies land, the long-term brand value argument sticks.
A client running a cost-control brief, a flexibility brief, or a short-term return brief is not the type of client your current proposition was built for.
So the most important question a sales leader can ask before a pitch shouldn’t be “how do I make this argument land?” It’s “what is this business actually trying to do?”
Not what we assume businesses are trying to do to make an effectiveness argument work.
Omar Oakes was the founding editor of The Media Leader and continues to write a column as a freelance journalist and communications consultant for advertising and media companies. He has reported on advertising and media for 10 years.