What's worse for marketing effectiveness measurement: ignorance or misplaced certainty?

What’s worse for marketing effectiveness measurement: ignorance or misplaced certainty?

Marketing effectiveness measurement is the number one skill required for growing customer engagement and loyalty. Ranked higher than customer data analytics and creativity - just - (and notably ranked a lot higher than A.I.) 93% of marketers in the DMA Awards judging community view effectiveness measurement as a highly important skill in the customer marketing space. The DMA’s Customer Engagement Skills Census also reveals that 78% of marketers think that their organisation should be spending more time focused on measurement in the next 12 months, as they look to optimise their marketing budgets and develop plans with real cut-through as the battle for consumer attention heats up.

With nearly double the number of marketers telling us that customer loyalty has declined in the last year vs the number who report an increase, there is more pressure than ever on marketers to accurately evaluate the impact of their spend. By measuring what channels, touchpoints, creative executions and target audiences are driving response, and linking the results to incremental movements in business metrics, marketers are looking for vital ammunition to bolster their cause during those tough budget-setting meetings with the CFO.

“But isn’t A.I. the answer?” marketers will be asked by their CFO, tantalised by the alluring prospect of “doing more with less” by pointing gen A.I. in the right direction. While A.I. is undoubtedly a driver of efficiency, the jury is out on whether it’s a driver of marketing effectiveness yet. The Customer Engagement Skills census tells us that while 64% of marketers are using A.I. to do things more efficiently, only 36% are using it to create and plan more effective marketing comms. In other words, it might save you money, but does it grow overall levels of revenue and profit from marketing spend? Right now, only for the minority of marketers it would seem.

Ultimately measurement is the most vital component of improved effectiveness, as any other approach is akin to flying blind or tossing a coin and hoping for the best. However, while it is clearly important to upskill teams in how to build and/or commission MMM models, Multi-Touch Attribution (MTA), incrementality tests and brand measurement, the technical know-how is only half the battle.

The other half? That involves wrapping the results up into a neat measurement framework: a framework that enables marketers to shortlist KPIs, select measurement methods, build benchmarks, set targets and record performance. A measurement framework should be cross-organisational and aligned between agency and client and crucially as detailed in the final chapter of last year’s DMA Value of Measurement report, should enable marketers to document key learnings to be applied to future marketing plans.

A useful video on how to build a measurement framework delivered at Adwanted Future of Media a couple of years ago can be found here (although the updated advice is that as little as 0.5% to 2% of marketing budget could be optimal for marketing measurement).

The DMA’s Measurement Taskforce has an ambition to build an interactive marketing measurement framework for members in 2026: a tool that will allows markets to start their journey in building a framework through an interactive dashboard, downloadable features and customisable options. But to build this framework we need partners – partners who are aligned to our ambition to unlock the value of measurement for the data-driven marketing industry and willing to share this vision with the DMA community of advertisers and agencies and beyond.

We will of course be drawing on the experience of the DMA Measurement Committee in building a unified framework too, given their expertise in the field of measurement. Take for example, this recently released marketing capabilities assessment tool developed by the MMM and MTA specialists Unifida. It’s free to access and factors in considerations related to reporting transparency, third vs first-party data dependency, organisational siloes, marketing objectives and channel usage to assess overall measurement capabilities. For those looking to either take their first steps or improve their marketing measurement, it’s a great place to start.

As UniFida themselves say, “The real danger lies not in ignorance, but in misplaced certainty.” Only by building a transparent and independent measurement framework, can marketers truly evaluate marketing performance free from the constraints of big tech platforms and opaque measurement methods.

If you’d like to partner with the DMA on building a unified measurement framework then we’d love to hear from you!