The Rising Tide Of Effectiveness Proves The Need For More Long-Term Partnerships

It wasn't quite the way to get the party off with a bang, but for anyone in any doubt of the work the industry still needs to do to demonstrate the value of marketing, Catherine Kehoe delivered some sober words in her welcome speech at the IPA Effectiveness Awards last week.

"Sadly, we appear to be getting less good at doing what we are meant to be doing, and that’s building the strong brands that drive outsized commercial returns," said Kehoe, chair of judges for the awards and chief customer officer for Nationwide Building Society. "Real effectiveness is in long-term decline as marketing is delivering ever lower ROIs, whilst media fragmentation and addressable buying is leading to brand awareness falling in many categories and geographies." 

And yet as an industry, we're talking about effectiveness and entering awards for it at record levels. And the resulting tide of case studies, fuelled by ever-improving tech that quantifies campaign success, makes for a solid bank of evidence of the impact of marketing investment on growth.

So why the disconnect? The proof of what marketing can achieve is stronger than ever, but we're actually delivering lower ROIs. One reason, of course, is the growing complexity and geopolitical and social challenges of the environment in which brands are operating. But has the way we approach marketing changed fast enough to cope?

Kehoe would argue not: "We have entered a new era of marketing effectiveness, but still much of our thinking has been honed from the age of ‘air power’, that saw carpet bombing and surgical strikes managed from a central command post, powered by enormous targeting and machine learning in media buying." She also cited the increasing weakness of TV to reach a mass audience and the walled gardens of the tech giants as being other significant contributing factors. 

The roll call of winners at the Effectiveness Awards - agencies such as adam&eveDDB, AMV BBDO and VCCP among them - also highlights another crucial insight: some of the most effective work is achieved by agencies working with long-standing clients, such as McCain, Guinness and Cadbury respectively. Deep relationships are crucial to understanding a business, supporting it meaningfully and knowing when to adapt to change. And that means longer-term agency partnerships, longer-term brand platforms and marketing teams who hang around longer than the proverbial two-and-a-half years. As an aside, our ongoing feature series Enduring Partnerships hopes to shift the obsession with judging agency success and CMO ambition on a new-business-centric metric and instead celebrates the sort of relationships that build sustainable growth for businesses on both sides of the client/agency divide (read our two latest here: Dove/Edelman and VML/HSBC)

As Mark Ritson urged this week, marketers must resist "the pornography of change". Citing the newly-released report from The IPA and System1, ‘The Magic of Compound Creativity’, Ritson - predictably - concludes that marketing is "fucked up" by a collective obsession with change. Instead, the IPA/System1 report underlines the crucial role commitment plays in driving growth and introduces the idea of a Creativity Consistency Score (CCS) as a metric for effectiveness.

It's an excellent report and well worth downloading. Read it alongside Kehoe's speech for a serious reality check and a fresh set of principles (while remembering that the game is ultimately the same - "the power of a big and simple idea, with emotionally engaging creativity, executed consistently over time, with brand purpose and product innovation working together, are proven again and again”) around which to focus your ambitions.