The Effectiveness Partnership’s Gurdeep Puri offers six areas of analysis for brands and agencies to deploy.

We live in volatile times. In two short years we’ve gone from global pandemic to conflict in Eastern Europe, and the twin spectres of inflation and recession are looming. Now, more than ever, businesses will be looking to their marketers to justify their salaries and prove the commercial value of their efforts. Which means that the effectiveness of marketing is going to be scrutinised more closely than ever before.

As an industry, we need to act decisively, proactively and fast, to take advantage of the brief window of opportunity open to us. If we get it right, we will lead the drive to greater effectiveness. If we get it wrong, we will struggle to catch up with it. Not all of us will make it.

To help us drive the future, The Effectiveness Partnership is collaborating with Cannes Lions and WARC to explore the Global State of Marketing Effectiveness right now, and what needs to be done about it to make our industry future fit.

We’ve put together six simple but crucial questions that brand marketers need to ask themselves. And we would love to hear your responses – so we are surveying the global marketing industry to find out how you see the challenges of effectiveness today to ensure that we as an industry can come up with the solutions.

The survey is open to all brand marketers worldwide and it takes just two minutes to complete. But you’ll need to act quickly if you want your voice to be heard; the survey closes on 3rd June.

We believe all marketers should be asking themselves how challenging they find the following within their organisation:

  • Relating creative activities to commercial returns
  • Making the strategic argument for creative campaigns and expenditure in the boardroom
  • Creating a unified set of objectives, strategies and KPIs across diverse marketing and creative
  • Fostering high levels of strategic collaboration, clarity and alignment across diverse stakeholders internally and within external creative agencies
  • Demonstrating how well each specific element of your marketing plan contributes to your organisation's bottom line
  • Clearly demonstrating the commercial value of Creative Excellence

Findings from this survey will be unveiled at Cannes Lions International Festival 2022 on Friday 24th June, as part of a dedicated WARC series on the Culture of Effectiveness, designed to help advance the understanding and practices of effective marketers.

So keep your eyes peeled and your ears tuned for the results, and the subsequent guidance that we will be developing, because as marketers we all know that creativity can deliver – but as the business environment changes we need to master the tools and know-how to bring others on that journey.

The survey is open until the 3rd June here.