CFOs have a way of cutting through nuance and asking the simplest question about advertising effectiveness: did the campaign work? Conversely, marketing has a habit of defaulting to a hedge with two answers to the singular question. The media mix model says the brand spend from the last two quarters is still paying off, slow and compounding with a return read-out not expected to show up for another quarter from now. Meanwhile the attribution reports say performance media drove the clicks and the clicks drove the sales. Lay both out and the CFO most likely defaults to the second of the two answers because what can fit neatly in next Friday’s report is better than an ask to check in next quarter. Brand growing campaigns get demoted again.
A new report from Ebiquity and the World Federation of Advertisers, built from 71 senior marketing leaders across ten industries, found that just 15% (!) of them say effectiveness data actually drives their budget decisions. Meanwhile 80% of these same organizations are running marketing mix modeling and brand lift studies, the expensive, sophisticated stuff. The tools are there and the discipline is there too according to one of the report's own sources at PepsiCo, yet somehow none of it moves a dollar.
This is deeper than shameless dashboard and data addictions I’ve written about in the past. Put aside whether the gorging on dashboards are worth it or not, they exist are humming. Too bad no one seems to want to act on the read outs.
It's tempting to blame the CFO’s impatience for MMMs and brand lift studies, the old story where finance only wants quick performance wins and won't sit still long enough for brand building to pay off. That story's comfortable because it makes marketing the victim.
But that’s not what’s going on here.
What’s really falling apart is the institutional inability to align on te goals and results. We know this because only 14% (!) of companies in the survey say marketing and finance agree on what "effectiveness" even means. Two functions inside an organization can't decide together if they're answering different questions and calling it the same one. Add to that that only 4% of marketers say they're confident they can separate short-term sales lift from long-term brand impact. So even inside marketing's own numbers, nobody's sure which lever moved what. To paraphrase Bruce Springsteen: 51 Dashboards (and Nothin' On).
I've written about this same failure showing up in other corners of modern organizations, wearing a different badge each time. Global IT builds for fairness instead of the hardest market and ends up with systems that are mediocre everywhere. CIOs referee turf wars instead of picking a translator's stance and holding it. Marketing here is doing the identical thing: refusing to name and align cross functionally on one north star, hedging between two measurement systems, and then calling the hedge rigor.
Look at what the hedge costs while everyone's still arguing. Retail media, influencers, AI-powered search, billions of dollars already flowing into these channels faster than anyone's built a way to judge them. Every quarter spent litigating what "worked" means one more quarter where the fund-scale-kill model can't do its job, because killing something requires an answer, and nobody's produced one. Spend doesn't pause while the definition gets argued out; it just keeps getting spent.
The same report notes marketers lean toward metrics that make them look good over the ones showing real commercial impact with three-quarters of these leaders also believing that more than half their budget decisions will be guided by measurement insights within three years. In the future; always three years. Three years is marketing's mañana. It's the vanity metric's cousin, just stretched across a longer runway so nobody has to answer for it this quarter and no one will remember it three years from now.
None of this gets fixed by buying more measurement. If anything, most marketing organizations should probably call a moratorium on more measurement until they can decide what any of it means and whether any of it will actually be used. 80% of these companies already have the tools sitting in the building. What's missing is an organization willing to sit finance and marketing down before the campaign launches, not after the results roll in, and agree on one definition of effectiveness they'll actually use to make the call. Put a real deadline on the kill decision too, so "we're still gathering data" stops being an acceptable answer at Q4 the way it was at Q1.
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