Are marketers stuck in an effectiveness ‘echo chamber’?

0:10Charlotte Rogers: Hello everyone and welcome to the latest episode of the Marketing Week podcast. I'm Charlotte Rogers, Deputy Editor and Intelligence Editor, and today we're taking a deep dive into the latest data from our 2026 Language of Effectiveness Survey. To get an insider's take on the numbers, I'm joined by Brian McCready, Head of Marketing at Law Firm, Adleshaw, Goddard, and Rachel Moss, TUI Group Head of International Marketing. So to kick us off, I'd love to take us to the theme of the research itself, which is how marketers express effectiveness. So we found that 44 % of the more than 630 respondents say they're working towards a shared understanding of effectiveness across the business, but they're not there yet.

0:47Charlotte Rogers: 18 % say they have a way of communicating effectiveness within the marketing team, which is different to the wider organisation. And 11 % don't talk about marketing effectiveness with the wider organisation at all. And just over a quarter actually say they have a shared language across the functions that ladders up to business objectives. Ryan, do those numbers resonate with you, especially that 18 % who say that they have a way of communicating effectiveness that differs from the wider organisation?

1:14Brian Macreadie: Yeah, I think it's pretty evident that we've got a way to go as a profession. I think the numbers were a little bit worryingly, though, for me. It seems like the minority have got a shared language with our business leaders. I think there's something to do. And I'm on the podcast as the B2B guy. I can see why there are some challenges with it. I think measuring effectiveness and talking about effectiveness is easier if you're in a business that sells products that you can sell within and track within your tactics work within a few weeks or months. So I used to be the marketing director at Getty Images and you would do a campaign about Olympic photos.

1:48Brian Macreadie: And within a month, you'd know how many Olympic photos you'd sold. It was quite easy to kind of test your tactics and see the results. But in B2B, a lot of it, you might be five plus years sales cycles. You might be having to use tactics with dozens of different people. You might have thousands of different touch points, some which can't be trackable at all. And in those cases, it's harder to kind of prove the effectiveness of which tactic is leading to which result. you know if you're trying to take 10 years to supplant somebody's existing parts manufacturer or part supplier how do you know exactly which tactic over those 10 years was the one that worked so I can understand why some b2b organizations are struggling with effectiveness I know we're going to come back to what do we do about it so yeah I was a little bit worried about the numbers were quite low but I think in certain b2b instances I can see why people are struggling

2:34Charlotte Rogers: with talking about effectiveness yeah absolutely I mean Rachel do you think it's concerning to brand point but that 11 % of the sample that say they don't talk about effectiveness with the organization at all now what's the risk there?

2:45Rachel Moss: I think sometimes we forget the scale of the different organizations we work in and absolutely if you're in a big business then you probably have got much more sight of what the organization is trying to achieve versus if you're a one-man band marketer so I think there's a little bit about who's filled the survey in we keep talking about it are we just talking about as an industry effectiveness in an echo chamber whereas actually when you go back to the definition of marketing and which I think is the Kotler one of meeting consumers needs profitably profit is what the business is trying to achieve or there will be another KPI maybe it's revenue over profit and we should be helping the business deliver that and if we can't does the business even need us so I think it's really important that we do focus on what matters to the business and have those conversations in line and be how do we get the 25 % to be the 75 % to be the 80 % and eventually the 99%.

3:40Rachel Moss: But equally, I think with a lot of facts and stats, it's about the context you're working in and also how the business views marketing. Do they just see you as like, are they seeing you as the one that creates the pretty stuff, the old-fashioned colouring in department? Or actually, do they believe that you could be a growth lever? And if you're the former, not the latter, how do you convince them that you can be a growth lever and help them understand why. That's a great question and sort of a great challenge.

4:08Charlotte Rogers: I mean, Brian, to that point around B2B, we find that just under a fifth of B2B marketers admit that their way of communicating effectiveness differs from the wider organisation. Do you think that's symptomatic of the fact that there are so many metrics you could communicate? And actually, there's ones that matter more within the marketing department and the ones that you might not necessarily share with your other colleagues. But there are ones that you would talk about, but there are ones that you'd keep within the team. So it's not necessarily a bad thing. It's thinking about like how you have that conversation?

4:36Brian Macreadie: I think that there's an echo in Rachel's point. I think we've blown it over the last 10 years where I think everyone has suddenly realised that the profession has been actually measuring efficiency metrics, not effectiveness metrics. We've invented our own language and our own KPIs that the rest of the firm, the rest of the company we work in wouldn't recognise like MQLs is the big one that's now everyone realised it's a crock in B2B and you We've been measuring cost per lead and cost per click and stuff, which has got no real bearing on driver sale at the end of the day. So I think our profession's got to look at itself in the mirror that we measured what we could, that was easy to measure, that tech vendors have told us.

5:16Brian Macreadie: Look, we can measure this for you. And we've all got excited about it. And we've lost sight of actually what our boards, our executive teams, our sales teams really, really care about. So I think we need to address the disconnect now. I think we've got to do something about it. I just think we focused on the wrong things for the last 10 years. And now we're seeing it in the effectiveness metrics.

5:36Charlotte Rogers: That is fascinating. Absolutely. And I think, you know, I wonder whether, because we also cut our data by size of business. So we split it as kind of large businesses. We talk about having 215 employees and over and then small businesses, 215 employees and under. And so it's a bit of a crude metric, but it's kind of what we go by. And we find that marketers and small businesses are almost twice as likely to choose not to talk about effectiveness with a wider organisation compared to their peers in larger firms. Rachel, do you think that size of business has a part to play here?

6:06Rachel Moss: I would imagine, and I'm currently working on a much smaller budget project within a large organisation, but I can imagine if you're a small, you don't have access to some of the things that really, really help you. So how do you spend your money? Actually, you have to go, well, can I afford the market research or the brand tracking, all of the luxuries that you have within a bigger business on a bigger brand that you will have ongoing brand tracking that you probably have an insight team and actually marketing might just be the execution of some consumer facing communication rather than really thinking about all of the levers because I think also with an industry in our industry what do we mean when we say marketing do we mean product price promotion place or do we mean marketing communications and i think lots of the time when we talk about effectiveness we talk about marketing communications and i think exponentially that has moved on although to brian's point the platform sells quite a lot of measurement in that perspective whereas actually if you're thinking about all of the levers well you'd be measuring well how much distribution do you have for your product or how many you know how many users is your website reaching so you're looking at your distribution channels and your product quality as much as how you use that promotional lever of marketing communications that is fascinating to actually

7:31Charlotte Rogers: think about in terms of what what do we truly mean by marketing and is it all of the four p's or is it just being reduced to one one p communications and i think you know we touched on earlier about this disconnect and for the first time we actually asked you know genuinely do you think that there is a disconnect between the way that marketing understands and interprets effectiveness and the rest of the business and 70 % of marketers said there was a disconnect. Rach, why do you think this disconnect is happening? Do you think it is that way of, you know, confusion about what marketing really is?

7:59Rachel Moss: I think you are very lucky if you work in an organisation that sees value in marketing, but equally that has to be delivered by marketing building the trust back up. So it has to be a two-way conversation that the business wants a marketeer to help step up and even lead around the table. Yeah, we were all judging the Marketing Week Awards. And what I loved about some of the entries I saw is actually how, when we look at crisis management, the marketeer was at the table to help solve the problem. So actually, what's the role of marketing seen within the business? And therefore, that's probably the better the role is, is delivered through the effectiveness that marketing can demonstrate, that you'd actually want to call that person in to be part of the gang.

8:41Rachel Moss: so I do think it's it's a big journey we're all on and not every every business is at the same stage

8:49Charlotte Rogers: yeah absolutely that that idea of marketing maturity within organizations is fascinating and Brian we found that three quarters of B2B marketers say that they're disconnecting their team what do you think can be done to close the gap because it's not that people don't know it's happening they know they just maybe don't know what to do yeah it's really worrying right the

9:07Brian Macreadie: stats. So I think a few things for me, and the first one is I think we've got to realign with what our executives and our boardrooms are really, really looking for. I think that we've got to forget the marketing rhetoric that we've all learned the last 10 or 15 years and ignore a lot of the marketing stats that you hear flying around in KPIs. And we've just got to get back and understand what is it our businesses really want? Is it repeat purchase? Is it cross sell? Is it subscription renewals? Is it minimising churn rate? Is it new business wins? What is it? I think is get down to some simple understanding and alignment with what really really matters to our business and then just organize around those simple things and in my business we're trying to keep it as simple as we can you know are we actually meeting in person key clients of interest that we would like to do more business with are we able to bring multiple in our line we call them practices in our work in a law firm that business services business units you might call another businesses are we able to bring three or four practices to our key clients um i think just keeping things really really simple is a great starting point i think there's a few other things i think we just have to talk to our cfo cfos and sales leaders far more often and make sure that what are we talking about is what they want us to talk about i'm hoping there's been a resurgence in people using the funnel you know we've all lived for an era where people saying the funnel is dead because they assumed it was us talking about how people buy and it was never ever that It was always just an internal tool to understand how many people have heard of us, how many people are considering us, how many people are inviting us to pitch in our world, how many people actually have then gone to be clients, how many did they repeat by.

10:43Brian Macreadie: It's the best ever management tool that we've ever had in sales and marketing just to keep a handle on how we're doing and where we're seeing a drop off in performance. And so I hope we're going to see a resurgence in people returning to just using the funnel as a simple mechanism to understand that are there people, where are we losing sales? What's the impediments to buy? Once we've converted somebody to a client, are they then coming back to us again and again and again? I think funnels are the greatest tool we've ever had to kind of keep an eye on that. And I think we should have a simple set of metrics, simple balance scorecard at every level of the funnel.

11:16Brian Macreadie: And I think people are coming around to that. I hear people at conferences. I hear people networking, talk about custom funnels far more than I've heard in the last decade. So I'm full of hope with that. There's a few other things. B2B specifically, I think people still need to get their CRM right. You know, we still need to have a full picture of your relationships with an individual client. We need to know down to that granular detail in B2B, like what is our relationship with this client? Do we know the right people? How is it developing? Where are we? What do they think of us? So CRM, I think a lot of people are still struggling with getting the right inputs to CRM and managing it properly.

11:50Brian Macreadie: And I guess then there's a last couple for me that I think are important. I think we can do a better job of educating our CFOs and our other colleagues about they want certainty for us. How much are we going to sell and when and what's the ROI on all of these things? But we have to kind of, I think, do a better job of articulating. It can take years for us to get returns and measure it. I think that, you know, not every tactic that we try will immediately generate massive returns. I think we have to help people understand that there are probabilities of success, not certainties of success. And then there's other non-numeric data points and effectiveness measures I think we should be really much more proud of.

12:28Brian Macreadie: I know that we have to use numbers in a boardroom context, but I think if we can share more research into what a client's thinking of us, why are they considering us? Why are they not? Why are they choosing to go to a rival business? I think I've yet to meet a boardroom that doesn't care about what clients think. So I think that there are qualitative measures that you can't put an ROI on, but are vital metrics for us and vital data points. And I think we have to be prouder that we're representing clients in the boardroom. And, you know, you can't put a number of value on it. But understanding what is actually driving purchase behaviour out there, what are people actually thinking of us, I think is vital.

13:02Brian Macreadie: And I think we need to be prouder of that data, that qualitative stuff as a profession. I think that's a really interesting point, Brian, because I think what it brings into is the marketer's ability to storytell, because you may not have the ultimate effectiveness kit at your disposal.

13:17Rachel Moss: But actually what you can do is go, right, business, you're trying to achieve this. This is my approach to it. And actually, this is what we've heard customers say. And particularly in this day and age where customers will leave reviews or they will, you know, whether it's TripAdvisor, whether it's Google, that is a far richer database and actually really important, probably far more important than ever for us to be aware of in the world of LLMs, where those AI search engines will find those comments potentially even faster than they will find our own branded content. So I think effectiveness and tell it goes alongside storytelling.

13:53Rachel Moss: storytelling. I love the idea of the storytelling and the effectiveness agenda being one and that

13:59Charlotte Rogers: idea of constant communication and having those lines of communication open and keeping it simple. I mean, one of the data points on this idea of the disconnect, we found that 72 % of CMOs and marketing directors see a difference between the way their team communicates effectiveness and the rest of the business. Rachel, do you think that it is their responsibility to do something about it?

14:18Rachel Moss: It's all of our responsibilities. I think marketers can do a lot of navel gazing and I think we have our hands on far more facts and stats than the business needs to know or even care about and i think that's the difference is we've got so much stuff that we tend to over complicate things and actually to brian's point keep it simple what's the business trying to achieve and what are the three four five stats and facts that you can bring to the board that helps them understand what you do they don't need to know everything but actually choose the most important ones and tell them consistently again longitudinal data ongoing measurement is what really really helps so how

14:57Brian Macreadie: do you tell a consistent story as well it's really interesting i find that i know a lot of senior marketers that that get very nervous around ceos and cfos and of course we get asked difficult questions that are we effective is what what we're doing working or not you know are we putting runs on the board for our business because that's what we're all paid to do you know we have to deliver results and we have to just face up that's that's the job but there's a side to this where I think with CEOs CFOs and the like they're really incredibly smart people and I find if you just have a really honest dialogue with them about look I can make this happen and I can prove this works but I can't demonstrate this they want to know what's going on they're just asking rigorous questions about can you give me a picture of what's happening out there is how do we know that these things that we're doing are they paying having an effect and I think as just long as you have a regular ongoing dialogue around what are you seeing what are you not seeing I can't demonstrate this overnight but I can within 18 months if I do a piece of research at the end of this to you know do a benchmark before I do a tactic and a benchmark afterwards in market research they get it they're really smart people they're great to work with and I think as just long as we are absolutely transparent about what we can measure over what time frame and how we need to measure it it is transformative yeah i've got a big investment that my colleagues and i are working on at the moment and and we were very clear that it was going to take us three years to demonstrate a return and we would need to do it using market research by talking to our actual target audience at the start and the end of this thing and you know my executive leaders that i report to they saw that logic and went for it as long as we just were able to articulate the logic around it and the rigor around it and they went okay we buy that so i don't think we need to be kind of scared about you know articulating what we can't measure overnight and what we need to do longer term things on we just need to be more comfortable having that conversation and just being honest

16:47Rachel Moss: about it and also on the things that you can't measure it's explaining why they align to the overall business strategy i'm doing this because i believe it will help the business goals i can't measure it but i believe i've got other things that i can measure that collectively will help us achieve it and i think that's yeah and also it's really important that we do try new stuff and we try stuff that we don't know whether it's going to work or not because otherwise you'll never move forward as a business and you know reach consumers in different ways places and spaces

17:18Brian Macreadie: yeah it's a great example that we're all familiar with every one of us lives in it and and i think it's i'm not sure it's more important b2b than it is in bt but pr right you know we know that in our world appearing on sky news or appearing on the f in the ft or appearing in the wall street journal or the Handel's Blatt or something is important. We know it helps, but it's really hard to demonstrate how that one soundbite in The Economist contributed to sales. But our boards understand that you don't want to be obscure. You don't not want to be in those publications. And I think they understand if your biggest rival is appearing in the FT every day and you're not, that creates a challenge.

17:58Brian Macreadie: But it's really hard to put a data point on what's the impacts and how did that influence future sales. So I think people understand that. Our CFOs understand that. They understand that you can't go dark. You can't be invisible relative to your rivals. And you just have to understand that it amplifies our reach. You know, we can put measures about the reach that it gives us. We can put measures around the advertising value equivalents of it. I think our CFOs, they're the smartest people in the room, right? They get this stuff. I think we just have to be comfortable about talking about what, again, what we can and can't measure easily.

18:30Rachel Moss: and I've built an out of home. Out of home has never come out brilliantly in any econometrics test I've ever run. But actually, it's a really helpful part of a big campaign because it's another point of contact with the customer. And we all see those billboards when we're walking down the street or by the bus stop. So there is something in them.

18:49Charlotte Rogers: We actually asked the question around creative effectiveness and over half of marketers said that measuring creative effectiveness is challenging and just 8 % said they had a comprehensive system in place for measurement. Why do you think so many marketers find the measurement of creative challenge? Is that just, I suppose, natural in a way, because there are some things that you just can't quite quantify?

19:09Brian Macreadie: I mean, I guess the classic way of doing this as marketers to prove is to do a holdout test. You run creative execution in one market and you do a non-creative execution in a different market and you compare and contrast the results. I think that is harder to do if you're in a world where your clients are spread all over the planet. they're not in a particular geography and all your work is conducted online where they can all see it it's harder to do hold out tests so i i do think it i can see why it's quite challenging to do it all i can say from my experience is that when you compare and contrast things that we've done that we felt had some emotional resonance to them versus things that we felt were quick we just had to get it out and were you know not perhaps imbued with lots of feeling we can see the uptake we can see the downloads the number of event attendants that we get when we do a more creative thing than a less creative thing you know we we've done things you know to provide some examples we invited some poets a couple of years ago to write poems about things like mergers and acquisitions and what it looks like if you're a founder and your business is getting sued you know we we invite some poets in to meet some of our clients meet some of our partners in our firm and we wrote poems about it and i think our engagement rates increased a thousand 650 % or something in weeks.

20:27Brian Macreadie: It was incredible. It was absolutely evident. As soon as you had a more emotive-based approach to something, it had a transformative effect. I did something with origami weightlifters to talk about balance sheet strength recently. We used something where we created a Bermuda Triangle to create this metaphor for where you're losing value in your contracts. We're trying to find a more interesting way to talk about everyday legal issues. and lo and behold you see all of a sudden you get 700 meetings out the back of it just my experience is that you try it and you see the results i think you have to be prepared to ask your company to back you to try a more creative thing and then just be judged on did it have a better result than the previous thing it didn't do what i have found as well is once you start more emotive based communications more creative more interest interesting surprising intriguing in provocative stuff once once your businesses start getting used to that it's very rare that they go backwards and say oh no can I go back to the more bland stuff please uh so you just have to start and I think people see the dividends it's just that sticking their first toe in the water is the is the all-important big one um but for me it is a direct more creative stuff is more effective this is is undeniable in my point of view your opinion there Brian actually resonates

21:45Charlotte Rogers: It's very much with our sample. So 71 percent, this is just for business marketers and large businesses, but they say creative quality is one of the most important factors in delivering effectiveness. And that's pretty consistent regardless. So there's that acknowledgement that creative quality matters. But Rachel, how do you go about sort of talking about creative quality with the wider organisation? You know, is that something the CFO cares about? Is it something that you can go into them with that message and say, we know creative quality matters?

22:10Rachel Moss: so i've used it a lot in terms of a leading indicator on campaign performance so before you've even gone live because all anyone wants to know is is the ad working so where i've found creative quality really help is that you've done pre-testing and you say actually we've got a great ad and it's we've got a great ad because of the measurement structure it's this quality of ad which means it's in the top x percent which means before we've even put any media money behind it I'm confident that what we're going to show to consumers is really good. Now, the results will come later. You need to wait three months, but I find it's a really helpful thing to go.

22:49Rachel Moss: I've set us up for success. It's a bit like when I go back to my FMCG days, it's like, oh, have I got enough distribution for my products? Oh, yes. So actually I'm starting from a good base. That's how I use, you know, you don't have to get the organization into the ins and outs of it. But also I think great ads people love like people feel it if you can show a good and also the other thing is i think it makes wider employees really really proud of the business they work in so i think it's something that yes you've created it to deliver against the consumer challenge you're trying to um overcome but actually what it can bring to the organization is a lot more pride and actually have a have a ripple effect in terms of how marketing can have a wider impact within the business.

23:37Brian Macreadie: I totally agree with what you say. We've done some things recently. We're the official legal sponsor of the Chelsea Flowers Show. We're the first ever firm to do it. And, you know, as we all know, as marketers on sponsorships, it can take some years for the effects to compound, for the results to really be seen. Back to the example I've used where I've, you know, my board have understood it's going to take us some time to demonstrate the real ROI on it. we can't misunderstand that when you run the chelsea flower show or you do something you run a billboard you do an immediate tactic and then when you get immediate anecdotal feedback from customers clients the next day it gives people that immediate sense of comfort okay people are noticing this and it's having effects and we we ran some floral billboards we did some stuff with the chelsea flower and we had 62 a4 pages of individual unprompted anecdotes that we were getting from people out in the market where we're getting people say oh my god this is absolute sodding perfection was one that stood in my mind we were getting wow this is gorgeous this is stunning and when you present back to colleagues 62 pages of these things that you haven't asked anybody to send you and this is from CEOs of businesses by the way it gives people that immediate sense of comfort okay I haven't seen the ROI yet but I can tell this is having a positive influence on the people that we're hoping to reach and so back to this the qualitative data and helping our boards, our executive teams, our colleagues understand what are people thinking about us?

25:02Brian Macreadie: What are they saying about us? It has value and gives you a little bit of time as a marketer to then build up the real hardcore, how much do we sell down the line? It gives you a little bit of time, luxury, to kind of work through the longer-term effectiveness returns. So I just want to echo what you're saying, Rachel, the understanding what are people feeling and trying to articulate that. It gives people a warm sense of comfort internally. You can't deny it, I don't think.

25:25Rachel Moss: But also I wonder, building on that, is actually, is effectiveness as much as marketing trusted? And by you taking those stories back to your board, Brian, there's a sense of trust that is built. And actually, when you haven't got the measurement, you need the trust to go on and do the more interesting things, the different things to reach the customers. So I think that's essentially what the numbers give you to some of those kind of more hard-headed board members. whereas trust is exponentially more valuable and it's worth just shouting out yeah i'm very lucky

26:00Brian Macreadie: to work in a business where i've got a board that are understanding of that where they have a long term site and i i feel pretty blessed i think any marketers work in that environment where you see you have a board and executive team that has got a long-term vision cherish that as a marketer right you know i think it's pretty rare i know you know we've all worked in startups each of us they're living week by week month by month and there it's about hardcore numbers overnight you You know, and so the different dynamics applying startups. But if you work in a business that's got long term horizons, it's brilliant.

26:30Brian Macreadie: And I value it greatly where I work. I'd love to put your brains on this, Brian, actually, because it sounds like such a progressive agenda.

26:38Charlotte Rogers: And the fact that trust you have and what you've built up with the organisation, believing so much in marketing. But we found that 56 % of B2B marketers said that measuring creative effectiveness is challenging. And that was versus 43 % within B2C. and 58 % in B2B said they had no analysis in place to measure creative effectiveness. Do you think that we talk a lot about creativity being injected more into B2B and B2B becoming more emotive in its comms and the way it presents? And you've talked about that here on the podcast. Do you think that there is that kind of move towards that sort of brand building, humour, emotion within B2B?

27:16Charlotte Rogers: And maybe we're just seeing that that might switch when we ask this question next year.

27:22Brian Macreadie: I hope so. I suspect so. I'm filled with hope on this one for a couple of reasons. First of all, I get to see a lot of B2B stuff. I'm fortunate to be a judge at a lot of the awards. And there is a lot of really amazing B2B work out there that most of us in our personal lives, we wouldn't get to see. You know, we might not be buying tractors, so therefore you're not going to get to see the tractor buying campaign that somebody's just done with cows over here, which was super cool. you so there's way more out there than um people know about it's just you don't get to see it because you don't buy microchips you know on on scale and you don't see the microchip campaign that somebody's done so i think there's way more out there than people give us credit for i'm pretty proud of the creative it's going on in b2b but also i see a difference if you go to conferences you go to networking for the last two or three years brand is big time back on the agenda.

28:18Brian Macreadie: Creativity is big time back on the agenda in a way that it probably wasn't eight or nine years ago. And we were all talking about, you know, absolute BS about, you know, content marketing or the metaverse or whatever the fad of the day was. And everyone got distracted with that short-term crap. So I'm full of hope for it.

28:35Charlotte Rogers: Maybe some more hope. But we started asking, well, we asked for the first time, do you think it's getting easier to prove marketing effectiveness? And 57 % of marketers say it is easier to quantify effectiveness than say five years ago but then 15 % said it was harder and I think what most CMOs and marketing directors that answered the survey said that they find it easier than five years ago. Five years ago was just a metric for us because that's when we started doing the language effectiveness survey but when you get into the free text you see people are quite split in for and against so some marketers say oh we've got easier access to rich data more robust analysis in place and actually interestingly greater insight and interest from the senior team which is a major plus point you know they care about this agenda on the flip side you see people saying well actually you know there's fragmented channels there's more data which makes it harder the tech doesn't live up to its claims and those people often say you know I don't have control over the budget to even invest in the analytics I need and then another respondent actually talks about the impact of AI being a challenge Rachel, do you think the marketing effectiveness is becoming easier to prove or is that too simplistic an argument?

29:42Rachel Moss: I think it comes back to what's effectiveness for your business. And can you get that clear line of sight and choose and making sure the metrics you choose ladder up to what the business is trying to achieve and don't share all of the metrics? I think we sit on hundreds and hundreds of metrics that are interesting for marketers and not interesting to the rest of the business. So I think you have to be choiceful. and I think I'm surprised people say it's more difficult I think that's because there's more things to measure but sometimes you know measure where you're spending most of your money it's probably the most important and measure the stuff that you're trying to do because it's new and different to see if you want to put more money into it so I think you have to almost break it down and work out what works for you and what's right within your environment because I think we can get ourselves in all sorts of nuts about what's in and what's out and again it goes back to keeping

30:34Charlotte Rogers: it simple absolutely i mean brian you spoke to us for a recent feature about how you unpicked that argument actually and you were talking about how in b2b you know it's as challenging as ever because of lengthy sales cycles that take years and the economic headwinds and things like ad fraud but you also credited marketers rightly with asking more difficult questions of the data providers so is it easier or is it do you need to think more about this in the round and actually it is

30:59Brian Macreadie: you know it's a work in progress for everybody I absolutely think so and I've got mixed views on is it easier to prove effectiveness I'm with Rachel on this I do think that there are better tools out there I think that we have got more data and I'm for me the thing about AI I'm most excited about is to use it to be able to connect to all these disparate data points that we've got to try and provide a uniform picture. So I'm optimistic that the AI tools that we're going to have access to are increasingly going to help us measure this stuff. I'm full of hope, but I do think it is incredibly tough.

31:34Let's not kid ourselves that, again, specifically in B2B,

31:38Brian Macreadie: when you have got a five or a 10-year buying cycle and you've got dozens of people in the buying decision-making unit within a business, the procurement director, we've got to convince, the CFO, the head of HR, the head of payroll, or whoever, you know, we're selling payroll tech, how many people in their info security teams, in clients and the procurement teams, how many people do we have to convince that ours is the right payroll tech to sell or to buy? You know, there's so many people and there's thousands of touch points over those 10 years. And when you see if I was speaking on Sky News or the BBC, was that the killer moment that got us top of mind?

32:12Brian Macreadie: Was it, did somebody see somebody speak at an event? There's no data point that will measure the influence of somebody speaking at a conference that was the thing that finally got us on somebody's radar. So I'm mixed. I think this is always going to be really hard. I think attribution is always going to be a nightmare in this massively complicated world. You know, outdoor media, per your point, Rachel, you know, we know it has an impact. We know people respond to it. But, you know, do we know that was the pivotal thing that ultimately led to the sale three years from now? I think it's always going to be really hard to tell.

32:44Brian Macreadie: I think we just have to be honest with ourselves that I don't think there's a Nirvana solution. I'm just optimistic that AI will help us at least corral all these different data points we've got in different places and at least try and provide some uniform picture of what's going on with our individual clients. I still think, honestly, I might be a bit old school. I might be painting myself in a corner here. I still think in B2B, the most important thing we can possibly do is just go and talk to your target audience on a regular basis and ask them what's going on. Ask them why did you buy from us?

33:16Brian Macreadie: Why did you pick us? we're grateful for your work but what was it that you you know I still think the old school thing of actually talking to customers is the best thing we will ever have as a profession I might I'm sorry if that sounds too old-fashioned but I think it's I think it's the the source code of success really.

33:34Charlotte Rogers: And I wonder whether based on the research that we've talked about today and there's still things to compromise for effectiveness but where do you think the effectiveness agenda is headed you know Rachel is it that keeping it simple thinking about what really matters and then having that dialogue and telling a story you know is that the kind of thing

33:52Rachel Moss: we need to lean into I'd say yes and I think exactly to Brian's point is how does AI help you find the way through how can you use the AI solutions to connect your various data stories to really help home down what's the two three things that you communicate week in month in year in year out that shows you're making progress and marketing is influencing business outcomes

34:18Charlotte Rogers: Ryan same question to you do you think it's obviously an ongoing journey and it's never going to be easy but it's something you know that's worth investing time and energy in yeah I

34:28Brian Macreadie: agree with everything that you just said and that Rachel covered and I just think we have to prove effectiveness we're an effectiveness function we're getting paid to deliver results we can't shy away from that you know and the results count and you know our businesses need that from us so I think we just got to lean into it and find the best way in our businesses of kind of demonstrating that I think there was something that you know the last 10 years of marketing one real positive that we've gained from it I mean there's many but there's one real big one I think we learned from startup culture was this idea of this north star metric you know they I think it came from the world of social media where it was like number of monthly engaged users was the number one thing that they wanted or whatever it was i think going back to let's see each as a team to keep it simple let's all pick one or maybe a couple of north star metrics the the ones that really matter to us and really matter to our business whether it's cross sell or whether it's subscription renewals or whether it's you know getting the right people buyers in a room with our sales people what what is it and focus on that and and do everything you can to kind of measure it report on it using both data and qual research i think that's where i'm at lots of work to do but absolutely

35:41Charlotte Rogers: fascinating conversation thank you both so much brian rachel for giving me so much insight um and um yeah i feel like i've learned a lot on this conversation um thank you so much for listening to the latest edition of marketing podcast and please do subscribe on spotify apple and acast we will be back with our next episode soon goodbye Bye.