Here’s a thought: Marketers can sell anything—except their own value

It’s a fact of life that many experts are spectacularly bad at following their own advice—and in marketing and advertising, we are amongst the worst offenders.

If you want advice on health and wellbeing, you see a doctor. Often, that doctor will tell you to lose weight or quit smoking. Yet globally—and particularly in Asia—there’s a good chance the doctor giving that advice is overweight or a smoker. In India for example, 54% of doctors are overweight. Globally, 21% of doctors smoke, rising to 25% in Asia. Hypocrisy at its finest?

And yet, even that pales compared to what happens in our industry.

Marketing effectiveness has been part of the conversation for almost 70 years. We’ve had learnings from the Godfather of effectiveness, and inventor of the IPA Effectiveness awards, the late Dr Simon Broadbent, his son, the late Tim Broadbent, who spent years in Asia developing effectiveness across brands, and luminaries like the late professor Peter Doyle, whose book Value-Based Marketing explained how to develop marketing strategies that actually worked.

Yet, we struggle.

We spend our lives telling our clients how to make their audiences value and want their products. That’s what we do for a living. Yet, when it comes to persuading our clients to value or want the services we provide, we rarely even know where to start. We struggle to demonstrate that what we do actually works for the C-suite. That’s not just something we say for effect—it’s an actual fact. A study conducted by TEP, Lions, and WARC revealed that 75% of marketers find it challenging to prove the commercial value of what they do. The same number said their biggest challenge was winning over their client’s C-suite.

Let that sink in for a moment.

Of all the people in the world, the C-suite—the one group who buys or doesn’t buy the work we create—is our target audience. And yet, they’re the very people we don’t know how to win over. How crazy is that? How utterly, maddeningly self-defeating?

Sometimes, you wish someone would pick us up and shake us.

And it's getting worse as the world changes and the number of marketing channels and measurement technologies increase. In a recent conversation with Simon Cook, CEO of Cannes Lions, he summed it up: “As CEOs grapple with mounting priorities, macroeconomic pressures and the relentless demand for growth, the role of creativity as a business multiplier has become increasingly palatable and better understood than ever before, and yet, understanding is not the same as action. Lions research has shown that the gap between belief and execution remains wide.”

And that’s the paradox—understanding and justification aren’t translating into action to close the marketing effectiveness execution gap. You might think the rise of performance marketing would have made a difference. And it has, but not always in a good way.

The growth of online advertising and the ability to monitor responses in real-time allows companies to pay for specific results—sales, leads and clicks. That’s performance marketing. Unfortunately, many in both the C-suite and the marketing industry now believe that’s what marketing effectiveness is all about. To some extent, they’re partly right—but only partly—and partial knowledge is dangerous.

Performance marketing has much to do with the persistence of this gap in recent years. For many C-suites, performance marketing has become synonymous with marketing effectiveness, seductively promising "performance on tap." But for all its value, it often leads to the wrong KPI framework—one that prioritises efficiency metrics like reach, mentions, and various "cost per" numbers. Yes, those are important. They’re an easy (if somewhat lazy) way for marketing to show success to the C-suite. But how often are they connected to actual perceptual, behavioural, and crucially commercial changes that benefit the business? Too rarely.

This has led to fatigue, yet we remain no better at articulating how the work delivers commercial benefit to the client’s business. When marketing is reduced to performance metrics, it becomes a downstream function, missing the broader commercial value it can offer.

WARC's The Multiplier Effect analysis puts performance marketing in context, providing an evidence-based guide to brand building in the performance era showing:

• The 'performance penalty' where overinvesting in performance advertising reduces revenue returns by 20% to 50%.

• Shifting from a performance-focused to a more balanced advertising portfolio results in a median sales effectiveness uplift of 90%.

• Best practice suggests allocating 40% to 60% of budgets to brand-building efforts.

Rather than merely justifying a broader approach to marketing effectiveness, this analysis creates a platform for collective engagement between marketing and the C-suite. To bridge this gap—and unlock the full value of marketing—we need to change the conversation. The key word here is alignment.

However, alignment isn’t just between the C-suite and marketing. It must also carry through to creative agency partners developing the work, research agencies tracking consumer response, and everyone involved in shaping marketing strategies. Strategy is dynamic, yet research often lags behind.

The C-suite has an important role here: ensuring marketers are involved early in setting upstream business goals. Only then can they correctly brief their creative partners and ensure the work addresses the right challenges. Marketers must reach upwards, yes, but the C-suite also has a responsibility to reach down.

At its simplest, this is about following our own advice—and being seen to do so. How credible can we be in helping clients identify and communicate the value of their products if we can’t even do it for ourselves?

After all, it’s about creating work that actually works.

Gurdeep Puri is the founding partner of The Effectiveness Partnership. Read his previous piece on agency consolidations for Campaign Asia-Pacific here.