We are the world’s marketing effectiveness company.

Why is it that our industry is so bad at following our own advice when it comes to demonstrating the value of what we do, to the people we need to win over?

It’s a fact of life that many experts and professionals are often spectacularly bad at following their own advice. It’s a fact of marketing and advertising that people in our industry are amongst the worst offenders.

If you want advice on health and wellbeing, you go to a doctor. Oftentimes, that doctor will tell you to lose weight. If you’re a smoker, you’ll be told to quit. Yet around the world, and in Asia in particular, there’s a very good chance that the doctor giving you this advice will be overweight or obese, like 54% of doctors in India[1]. Or else that doctor will be a smoker, like 21% of doctors worldwide and 25% in Asia.[2] Or both.

Yet all these things are as nothing compared to what goes on our industry.

We spend our lives telling our clients how to make their audiences value and want their products. That’s what we do for a living. Yet we ourselves rarely even know where to start when it comes to persuading our clients to value or want the services we provide.

We struggle to demonstrate that what we do, actually works to the C Suite….

That’s not just us saying something for effect. It’s an actual fact. A study conducted by The Effectiveness Partnership , LIONS and WARC, revealed that 75% of marketers found it challenging to prove the commercial value of what they do. [3] The same number said that their biggest challenge was winning over their client’s C Suite.

Let that sink in for a moment.

Of all the people in the world, C Suite are the one group of people who buy – or don’t buy – the work we create. They’re our target audience. And yet they’re the very people we don’t know how to win over. How crazy is that? How utterly, maddeningly self-defeating?

Sometimes you wish someone would pick us up and shake us.

It’s not that the knowledge isn’t out there.

Marketing Effectiveness has been part of the conversation for almost 70 years. We’ve had learnings from the Godfather of effectiveness, and inventor of the IPA Effectiveness Awards, the late Dr Simon Broadbent, his son, the late Tim Broadbent, who spent years in Asia developing effectiveness across brands. We’ve had effectiveness luminaries like the late Professor Peter Doyle, whose book Value Based Marketing explained how to develop marketing strategies that actually worked.

Yet still we struggle.

It’s also getting worse as the world changes and the number of marketing channels and measurement technologies increases. In our recent conversation with Simon Cook, CEO of Cannes Lions, he says: ‘As CEOs grapple with mounting priorities, macroeconomic pressures and the relentless demand for growth, the role of creativity as a business multiplier has become increasingly palatable and better understood than ever before, and yet, understanding is not the same as action, LIONS research has shown that the gap between belief and execution remains wide…’

And that’s the paradox, understanding and ‘justification’ isn’t in practice closing the marketing effectiveness execution gap. You might think that the rise of Performance Marketing would have made a difference. So it has. But not always in a good way.

The growth of online advertising, and the ability to monitor and measure responses in real time, allows companies to pay for specific results, such as number of sales, or leads or clicks. That’s Performance Marketing. Unfortunately, many in both C Suite and the marketing industry have come to believe that this is what Marketing Effectiveness is all about. To some extent they’re only partly right. But only to some extent. And only partly… Unfortunately, partial knowledge is a dangerous thing.

Performance Marketing has much to do with the persistence of this gap in recent years. For many C Suites, Performance Marketing has become synonymous with marketing effectiveness, seductively promising ‘performance on tap’. For all the value it offers, it often results in the wrong KPI framework for assessing if the work has actually worked in terms sustained business impact and relegates the role of marketing to the efficient delivery of Reach, Mentions and various Cost per…metrics. These are important efficiency metrics, and an easy (if somewhat lazy) way for Marketing to show success to the C Suite, but how often are they connected to any perceptual, behavioural and crucially, commercial changes for the benefit of the business?

For the C Suite, a ‘marketing = Performance Marketing’ mindset’ tends to deposition Marketing as a downstream function, as well as miss out on the broader commercial value that Marketing can offer.

A new WARC analysis, The Multiplier Effect, puts Performance Marketing in context, providing an evidence-based guide to brand building in the performance era. It shows:
• The ‘performance penalty’, where overinvesting in performance advertising reduces revenue returns in the range 20% to 50%
• Shifting from a performance-focused to a more balanced advertising portfolio results in a median uplift of 90% in terms of sales effectiveness
• A best practice range of 40% to 60% for the budget allocation to equity-driving

Rather than just ‘justifying’ a broader, more balanced approach to marketing effectiveness (and role for Marketing), this analysis provides a platform for collective engagement between Marketing and the C Suite.

So, to bridge the Marketing and C Suite gap – and related barrier to delivering the full effectiveness value of marketing – let’s change the language and have a more upstream conversation aligned strategically at the commercial level. The key word – and mindset shift – here is Alignment.

But it’s not only alignment between the C Suite and Marketing we would argue, it should also carry on downstream to the creative agency partners that are developing that magic, an experience, a new platform, a campaign to change a behaviour… this drive for alignment needs to weave in everyone involved in the development and assessment of marketing strategies.

This would include the Research agencies tasked with tracking consumer response. Whilst Strategy is invariably dynamic, we often see that Research is passive and then lags far behind those strategies that are in development. Supporting the argument again a need for alignment.

There is an important role here for the C Suite to help bridge this gap. Ensuring thatMarketers are included and allowed to work hand in glove in the determining of upstream business goals for the organisation. It is only then that Marketers can correctly brief their creative partners on the task that needs achieving, and what is required from the work. No doubt Marketers need to reach upwards and become more upstream, but we would argue that the responsibility also lies within the C Suite to reach down as well.

So, in a multi disciplined, multi channelled world of ever-increasing complexity, we prescribe the doctrine of Alignment based on a shared goal, promoting a simplicity in communicating with each other. A world where marketers and those charged with commercial growth, ensuring shareholder value, speak the same language and align on a common purpose. A world where those tasked with creative experience development are focussed on solving issues that matter much further upstream in the client organisation.

At its very simplest, its about us finding a way to follow our own advice, and to be seen to be following it. Because how credible are we ever going to be as experts in helping clients effectively identify and communicate the value their products if we can’t even do it for ourselves?

After all , it’s all about the work…that actually works, right.

[1]https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC10077730/#:~:text=Results:,be%20significantly%20associated%20with%20obesity.

[2]https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC8705497/

[3] https://theeffectivenesspartnership.com/2023-marketing-challenges/

First published in Campaign Asia 26 Feb 2025