The advertising and marketing industry has spent the best part of 20 years building increasingly sophisticated ways to describe its own activity while becoming progressively worse at explaining its commercial value and confusing measurement with credibility.
Attribution modelling has become the drug of choice because it gives everyone the feeling of certainty. Dashboards filled with increasingly precise explanations of what supposedly drove what; agencies learned to narrate performance in forensic detail; and marketers were encouraged to believe that because something could be measured, it therefore mattered commercially.
Meanwhile, boards keep asking the same brutally simple question: “Is marketing actual driving growth?”
Instead of optimising reporting frameworks, agencies should be helping clients address the underlying commercial constraints that are holding growth back. They should be answering business questions not channel questions, improving efficiency metrics instead of interrogating whether the work is increasing demand, strengthening pricing power, improving customer quality or making the business more competitive over time.
Businesses do not run on CTRs, engagement rates or attributed conversions. They run on revenue growth, profitability, margin expansion and confidence in future cash flow. Most CFOs are not interested in whether a dashboard looks healthy if the underlying economics of the business remain stubbornly unchanged.
That is why marketers should now expect far more from their agencies than performance narration dressed up as strategic thinking.
The agencies worth keeping close are the ones capable of understanding where growth friction genuinely exists inside the business and aligning strategy, creativity, media and technology around removing it, and who enable smart marketers to begin rebuilding the relationship between marketing performance and financial performance.
At the very least, any agency worth its salt should be delivering its client a three-layer strategy for growth.
The first layer is diagnostic: acquisition costs, conversion rates, attribution pathways and channel efficiency. These metrics matter because they help optimise activity, but they are not proof of growth.
The second layer is commercial: retention, lifetime value, repeat purchase, customer quality and share of market. Here, marketing starts connecting to the economic health of the business rather than simply the efficiency of media spend.
The final layer is the one boards actually care about: revenue growth, margin contribution, payback period and future cash flow. If an agency cannot credibly connect its work to those outcomes, marketers should question whether they are buying a strategic partnership or simply sophisticated reporting.
Marketers need to begin pushing agencies to wean themselves from the addiction to attribution or find partners who are already clean. The brands that succeed will not be the ones with the best reporting, but the ones who can deliver real growth – and that starts with the right agency.
Renaye Edwards is global chief operating officer and MD Europe at Ammunition
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