If most of the C-suite is paid based on growth of the company—and the CMO is supposedly the executive most responsible for growth—then why aren’t they the most respected and powerful person in the company?
If growth is the focus, and it is, and marketing is the growth engine; this should not even be a debate.
And yet it appears that it is.
Why?
Because trust has always been fragile around marketing.
I know that’s uncomfortable, but I ask you to reflect for a moment.
I think it’s some of the best news I can share today.
If the lack of trust were purely someone else’s fault, or affected by external factors out of our control, then there would be very little we could do about it.
I am here today to suggest that it is something we can fix.
And to be clear, what I’m suggesting is as old as the human experience itself.
The philosophy of stoicism is much about focus on what you can control.
Buddhism teaches the same thing—stop trying to fix the outside world; work on yourself.
Psychology calls it an internal ‘locus of control’
The good news is, this is ours to fix
As the industry’s trade body for major CMOs, I feel it is my responsibility to develop assessments and theses of where we stand, as I have shared the last three years here at POSSIBLE.
Even if they might be uncomfortable viewpoints.
In year one, I said marketing is where the medical profession was in the mid-1800s—when people thought bloodletting was a good idea. For centuries, it sounded smart, but they were dead wrong.
Two years ago, I said we are “too busy to do better.” That we were buried in activity, drowning in deliverables, moving so fast we didn’t take enough time stop and ask: Is this the most powerful way to drive impact on the business?
By the way, being too busy is not a badge of honor. It is the most expensive form of standing still in business.
And last year, I argued that marketing is not yet a profession, meaning few marketers are educated or certified in marketing science the same way that architects and engineers are schooled in building science.
Marketers have tended to be oriented toward applied experience with a dose of storytelling. But a profession does not advance through opinion. It advances through building knowledge.
So year one, I told you your profession was medieval. Year two, I said you were too busy to fix it. Year three, I said you weren’t really a profession.
The good news is I’m running out of ways to insult marketers
This year, I want to take the next leap forward.
Because here is the crazy thing: A lot of the knowledge already exists
We’re just not universally applying it.
The uncomfortable part is that marketing has not consistently and pervasively made scientific knowledge a part of our process.
This is not a call to just go discover new insights — although a lot of that work still needs to continue, and that is a major focus at the Marketing + Media Alliance and our Think Tanks.
This is a call to codify what’s already been proven and start applying it. Make a commitment, as I said last year, to scientific principles.
It is time to end the Age of Opinion in marketing
And that brings us back to the real issue.
I’ve said this before, one of the elements of a profession is a codified body of knowledge—one that practitioners learn, believe in, and build on top of.
The closest thing marketing has is the book Empirical Generalizations About Marketing Impact by Dr. Dominique Hanssens at UCLA, and published by Marketing Science Institute. It was last updated in 2015.
It haw 125 empirical generalizations that were based on around 10,000 research papers. It is, as academics call it, SETTLED knowledge.
Now the challenge is, I have never met a marketer who knew about the book, let alone read it.
I’ve asked marketers about this book for 10 years. The most common response is a polite pause and a change of subject.
So let me give you three examples of the kind of knowledge that’s in there .
Ad spend increases won’t create a surge in sales
The median payoff on a 10% increase in ad spend is a 0.5% lift in sales
That’s it. Note, that is 0.5% sales, but not profit.
And it’s been declining every decade since 1960. But here’s what most brands miss: as I said earlier, we don’t or didn’t know the long-term effect for each of our brands.
Advertising’s output isn’t an immediate sale— it’s a mental state that delivers long term. The challenge is we can’t tell the CFO the financials of that long term investment
Until now. More in a minute.
Note though, most academic research suggests that advertising is one of the least valuable elements in the marketer’s tool kit, versus product, pricing, even sales, and more.
Promotions won’t help you grow
75 cents of every dollar spent on promotion goes to stealing customers from a competitor who is spending to steal yours right back.
Only 10 cents of that dollar actually grows the category. For many brands, your heaviest users, are major switchers.
Promotions don’t build demand—they redistribute it.
At scale, this is maybe the most expensive stalemate in business.
Distribution drives more impact than advertising
Lastly, did you know that distribution has 67 times the sales impact of advertising?
Getting onto one more shelf, into one more channel, moves more product than any purpose-driven creative, or any media plan ever written.
The most powerful marketing decision a brand makes isn’t creative. It’s where they show up.
As an ex-advertising agency guy, that one hurts.
This knowledge exists. It has been tested, proven, published, and peer-reviewed.
I believe few in our profession are using it
Sure, some of it might trickle down through experience passed on, but a profession and each professional needs to understand the underlying science.
So that’s the knowledge we’ve been ignoring for decades. Now let me tell you what we’re ignoring more recently.
Remember I mentioned the financial contributions of brand long term? The Marketing + Media Alliance, based on five years of research, thinks it’s around 5X at this point, meaning an additional $5 million in sales are generated over time on top of the initial $1 million in sales during a campaign.
But what is it for your brand? There is a methodology that you can use to capture that knowledge.
Or the insane increase in impact when AI-driven machine learning is used properly to serve personalized ads to audience cohorts? On average, based on 30 lab experiments done to date, it looks to be over 125%. That’s more than double.
Why isn’t everyone doing personalization of ads today?
You get the idea. There is scientific and advanced knowledge out there today that’s just not universally known or being applied.
Is AI the answer?
First, let me be clear: having worked with AI now for several years and applying it to marketing, and having seen a lot of these trends for the last three decades, AI is real. It is foundational. It is revolutionary.
And it will absolutely shape how marketing works and how marketers work.
You must learn AI fluency, which is: You know when, where, and how to apply AI.
This is not optional.
But AI is not the answer to our opinion challenge.
Because if you ask AI what good marketing looks like, it mostly gives you back the OPINIONS that exist for marketing. AI reflects patterns. It is not expertise or judgment, at least currently.
And what if what is already out there is flawed?
AI will not save you from it. It will scale it.
If your assumptions are wrong, AI compounds the error. If your measurement is weak, AI makes you feel more confident about the wrong insights. If your theories about growth are made up, AI will industrialize them.
So yes: Learn AI fluency.
But do not confuse learning the machines, with knowing truth.
So why does all this matter to me?
I’ve said this before, I was presented with the opportunity to develop multi-touch attribution over 20 years ago that gave me deep insight into what marketers and marketing does well and not so well.
That body of work, those studies over five years, showed me that campaigns failed 47% of the time before a dollar of media was spent
That insight intensified my personal discomfort knowing I wasn’t fully confident on the recommendations I had been making to clients when I was in the agency business.
Now, as the head of a non-profit industry body, I have committed to making marketing a trusted and respected profession. It is my mission, it is my body of work.
But I cannot do it alone. None of us could. It requires an alliance that includes all marketers, and those that provide solutions to marketers, working together.
Luke Skywalker didn’t start the Rebel Association. He started the Rebel Alliance.
That best captures why MMA rebranded last year.
We marketers need to build more competency in how marketing actually works
And within that, I believe, lies trust
We need a codified body of knowledge. Transferable knowledge. Tested knowledge. A new commitment to scientific thinking and approaches.
Because professions do not run on vibes.
Watch for more on this later this year.
So let me close with this.
Imagine if marketing’s impact were truly predictable: if the CMO were not the person fighting to defend a budget, but a critical and recognized partner in making the business grow, enriching the fortunes of every executive at the table. And shareholders.
And imagine if we stopped acting like a collection of opinions and started acting more like a real profession.
Imagine if trust in marketing rose because predictability in marketing rose.
Imagine if the rest of the company got out of the way when we walked down the hall because they were in such awe of us.
That is our opportunity, everyone. That is our path.
The age of opinion is ending.
The next era belongs to those who can turn knowledge into judgment, judgment into action, action into profitable growth, as predictable profitable growth will build trust.
And back to my earlier point about the opportunity for growth.
MMA’s estimates suggest if you execute just on what we know today, and do it before your competition—the market capitalization of your company has a 0.7 coefficient to go up 10% to maybe 20%.
The future of the profession of marketing is in your hands. That is the good news today.
