How brands are creating a culture of marketing effectiveness

In this new video series, created in partnership with Thinkbox, we speak to marketers from Diageo, Direct Line and Barclaycard about how they create a culture of marketing effectiveness, the role of specialist units and driving collaboration across the business.

As marketers come under increasing pressure to prove the value of their investments, creating a culture of effectiveness and setting teams up so they can show how marketing leads to business growth is becoming a necessity.

In the first episode of a new video series, created in partnership with Thinkbox, we examine how brands are creating a culture of effectiveness and how that effectiveness focus is instilled across the business.

At Diageo, for example, the marketing team has set up a tool, called Catalyst, that aims to bring together data and analytics to enable marketers to make better decisions on where to invest in real time.

Andrew Geoghegan, global head of consumer planning at Diageo, says: “For our brand managers, [Catalyst] helps them optimise every pound and penny they spend against the activities to get to better outcomes.

“The system has enabled us to overcome all the difficult things – the time it takes in pulling data together, the expertise you would need in running scenarios, the direct link it gives us through into our media-buying agencies. It’s just made all the pain points go away and given our marketers direct access to a tool that saves them a bunch of time, as well as enabling them to think differently about the kind of scenarios they could use when preparing to spend their money.”

Meanwhile, at Direct Line, the marketing effectiveness team remains separate but takes a consultancy approach, aiming to steer marketers’ decisions and thinking but without “wielding a stick”, according to Ann Constantine, head of insight and marketing effectiveness at the company.

READ MORE: Brands shift marketing effectiveness focus from justification to learning

“We try to operate much more in a collaborative and consultancy way. The budget owners are the budget owners, my team don’t own that budget but they can advise, help and steer people with their decisions,” she explains.

For Mark Ritson, the key to establishing a marketing effectiveness culture is taking a strategic view, looking not just at tactics and advertising but also areas such as product development and sales force. “That vision of ROI is a much broader one and takes the longer-term view.”

For more insights into how marketers are instilling a culture of effectiveness across their team, watch the full video above.

Ebiquity and Gain Theory ‘s report on making the business case for advertising can be downloaded here. 

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