‘Marketers’ obsession with ROI and short-termism undermining growth’
The rise of short-termism in marketing, including an obsession with ROI, is undermining the effectiveness of campaigns to drive long-term profit growth and market share, a ground breaking new report has confirmed.
The pursuit of highly-targeted short-term sales activations, often on digital platforms like search and social, has come at the expense of long-term brand building activity, which has fuelled a five-year decline in the effectiveness of the top performing UK campaigns.
These are the findings of Media in Focus: Marketing Effectiveness in the Digital Era, which analysed 500 ‘digital era’ case studies of marketing campaigns in recent years, including 120 cases from 2014 to 2016 to present a modern picture of how recent trends in marketing are impacting results.
It was co-authored by Adam & Eve DDB head of effectiveness Les Binet and global authority on marketing effectiveness Peter Field forhe UK’s peak advertising body IPA in association with Thinkbox and Google.
“Wherever you go, we are pulling billions out of brand building for long term growth in order to fund this obsession, this addiction to short-term sales activation because we think it’s cool,” Field told the Communications Council’s Marketing Effectiveness on Trial event in Sydney last week.
In Australia, most of this money is being diverted into search and social media channels. In the past five years where marketing effectiveness has declined, marketers have nearly doubled their investment in search from $1.8 billion in 2012 to $3.4 billion in 2016.
“It’s a huge mistake,” Field adds. “We’re not anti-search. Paid search has been one of the founding stones to improvements to efficiency, but we’ve just gone too far, we’ve put too much money into it.
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