How CMOs and ad agencies can work together to make marketing more effective than ever before.
Musa Kalenga on making marketing more effective
We are living in a paradox. Never has marketing had more tools, more data, and more reach. Yet never has the value of marketing been more questioned inside boardrooms.
The decline of marketing effectiveness
A recent study by Google and Kantar called The Effectiveness Equation reveals that only 40% of senior marketing leaders believe their organisation has a clear goal for marketing effectiveness. Worse still, just 20% say there’s a shared understanding across the business on how to measure it.
This misalignment represents a significant commercial risk: when CMOs can’t prove the impact of their work, marketing budgets are often the first to be cut, throttling business growth before it can begin. Worse still, throttled marketing budgets can mean commodification in the long term.
This isn’t a failure of capability. It is an apparent failure of coherence.
As marketers, we must confront an uncomfortable truth: we haven’t always been clear about how marketing builds value. At the same time, the c-suite, particularly the finance portfolio, continues to operate on deterministic measures of performance. The result is a culture clash: a probabilistic function being judged by quarterly earnings reports.
Where and how did this breakdown begin?
The trust deficit
Marketing is struggling with a legacy perception problem. Historically, its role was to drive awareness, then sales, and then scale. In the pre-digital era, those links were assumed but rarely quantified. Today, we have unprecedented access to metrics, but many of them are the wrong ones. Clicks, conversions, and cost-per-acquisition are easy to measure but tell only part of the story.
The Google/Kantar study underscores this. The primary issue is that most marketing effectiveness frameworks prioritize short-term returns, thereby undervaluing the long-term effects that foster brand building and pricing power.
Organisational silos and the priority misalignment between finance and marketing further complicate this. The research shows that 48% of CMOs cite brand building as their top priority, but this doesn’t even crack the top five for CFOs. It appears that marketing and finance aren’t even speaking the same language. Without a shared language between departments, marketing remains vulnerable to being seen as an expense, not an investment.
Collaboration is a competitive advantage
The solution isn’t more dashboards or data points. It’s cultural. Brands and agencies must work together to foster a shared language and culture of marketing effectiveness.
To do this, brands and their agencies need to speak a commercial language and find alignment with the CEO and CFO about effectiveness measures. Brands need to bring agencies closer into strategic planning conversations, while agencies must push beyond execution to help define and defend the business case for creativity. And how advertising builds business value.
At The Brave Group, we’ve seen the power of this partnership. When marketers and agency strategists are aligned not just on KPIs but on commercial outcomes, creativity becomes accountable, and effectiveness becomes visible. This requires a shift in how we brief, how we measure, and how we communicate value across the c-suite.One key shift is moving away from measuring outputs and vanity metrics to measuring outcomes like shifts in pricing power, brand equity, and customer lifetime value.
Marketing needs a makeover
To do this, marketing must undergo a moral reawakening. The era of unbridled scale for scale’s sake is over. If marketing is to remain relevant, not just profitable, it must be sustainable. It must live in service of humanity and its future survival in partnership with a fragile planet.
The traditional view held that marketing’s role was to fuel consumption. But in today’s climate-constrained world, we need to redefine marketing’s mission: from growing volume to growing value. This means focusing not just on how much we sell, but on the quality, longevity, and impact of what we sell.
Marketers and the c-suite need to align around the thinking that business value is built through shared meaning, salience, and differentiation. It is built by branding, not just performance marketing. Effective marketing enables brands to achieve greater margins, have more room for innovation, and crucially become less reliant on excessive consumption to drive profits.
A call to courage
The irony? Sustainable brand building is not a concession to effectiveness. On the contrary, it is a multiplier of it.
What’s needed is an integrated approach, what I call the 'both/and' mindset. We must embrace both creativity and accountability, both inspiration and insight, both data and humanity. And we must embed this mindset into the very architecture of our teams, our agencies, and our boardroom conversations.
It’s time for marketers to get brave not just in our ideas, but in our frameworks, our collaborations, and our commitment to real commercial impact. Marketing is not the colouring-in department. It is the engine of pricing power, the architect of customer preference, and the guardian of long-term value creation.
