This Future of Marketing Briefing covers the latest in marketing for Digiday+ members and is distributed over email every Friday at 10 a.m. ET. More from the series →Brand marketers underwrite the ad industry’s creative endeavors. But many still aren’t sure they can justify the output of their creative agencies to C-suite colleagues.According to a survey of senior marketers conducted by measurement firm Gain Theory, 49% said they weren’t confident that the data they had would help them defend marketing decisions to a CFO.
The study by the WPP-owned firm, which included 115 brand marketers, also found a disparity between the rigor used to question media investments versus creative. While 80% agree that media and creative are as important as each other, 59% said they apply more scrutiny to media effectiveness than creative, and only 40% said they applied the same level of scrutiny across the board.
Most starkly, a majority of marketers in the study, 62%, said they were spending on media that carried creative assets whose true value — positive or negative — was an unknown quantity. Similarly, recent Forrester research suggested that the bulk of generative AI investments (81%) were directed toward creating efficiency initiatives, rather than solutions that measure marketing effectiveness (49%).
