Could the ‘vocabulary of brand’ be making measurement harder?

Are marketers confident they can measure the business contribution of brand marketing?

In a word, no. Just 11.1% of the more than 1,000 brand marketers responding to Marketing Week’s 2025 Language of Effectiveness survey, in partnership with Kantar and Google, believe their company is ‘very successful’ at measuring the impact of brand marketing and can ‘comprehensively demonstrate’ its overall business contribution.

While over a quarter (28%) claim to be ‘quite successful’ at building a reasonably good picture of brand’s commercial contribution, two-fifths (39.3%) admit they can only quantify some of its effects and the picture is incomplete.

Some 14.8% of marketers have difficulty quantifying the effect of brand at all, while 6.9% admit they are ‘generally unable’ to demonstrate its commercial contribution.

ITV measurement innovation lead, Sameer Modha, believes the data exemplifies the classic brand versus performance tension.

“They’re saying: ‘I think this is important, but I’m not going to spend more on it,’” he explains. “I would see the 11% as really an artefact of the same thing, which is it’s not necessarily them saying I know what I’m doing when it comes to brand effectiveness.”

Do you want to spend most of your time convincing the rest of the business that your work is valuable, or do you want to work for a business that inherently believes in the power of the brand?

Kerttu Inkeroinen, Lucky Saint

He can imagine the mindset of a marketer taking the survey who works in a business where brand marketing is seen as a “pain in the arse” and isn’t even discussed with finance or anyone outside the department.

“That’s a pattern we see as well. We see a lot of advertisers saying: ‘I’ve got a brand tracker somewhere, but I don’t really talk to anyone else about it, because I’m worried they’ll laugh at me.’”

The performance/brand dichotomy doesn’t do anyone any favours, says Modha. He points to comments made by Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg in May on the Stratechery podcast.

During that discussion, Zuckerberg explained the social media platform wants to get to a point where an advertiser says: “Here’s the business outcome that I want, here’s what I’m willing to pay, I’m going to connect you to my bank account, I will pay you for as many business outcomes as you can achieve”. He also claimed Meta is “better at finding the people who are going to resonate” with a product than the brand is.

Explaining this has actually been the reality for a decade, Modha argues there are “very few people” in the industry who have experienced both the brand side and the performance world characterised by Zuckerberg.

“You end up in these slightly sterile debates where on the one hand you’ve got people who think brand is the answer and therefore something about long term and future investment, and you know ‘Paying rent for the space in people’s heads.’ All that language that we learn when you come up through the classic advertising ranks,” he says.

“Then on the other hand, you got a bunch of people who just think that’s mad, because they’re like: ‘This [Meta] is what advertising is and what is this BVOD stuff? Or what is this CTV stuff? That just looks odd to me, because I can click a button and five minutes later, I can go and look at my results. Why can’t you do that?’ What’s going on underneath us is more about the disconnect between these two cultures.”

Indeed, Modha believes the “vocabulary of brand is getting in the way” of a nuanced debate. He takes the example of TV, which he explains can deliver near term, in the quarter effects – a fact that isn’t always acknowledged,

“We’ve let it be so polarised between the very short term and the very long term, we’ve just created this weird standoff,” he argues.

North Star metrics

This idea of two worlds colliding is something CMO and consultant at Trinity Square, Mary-Anne Russell, has also witnessed.

She describes marketers as living with the consequences of a “new world of data”, where many businesses have focused on lead generation and what marketing can do to create leads, which is the “easiest” data to analyse.

“That’s the one they go to first, therefore the place where they mature first. The next step is to look at brand marketing data, but there are not many businesses that are at that point, or it feels quite difficult,” Russell notes.

She questions how much airtime brand marketers get within businesses, arguing not many people in the boardroom understand that brand delivers better lead generation.

“If you look at what’s happening in the boardroom, the CFO does not give a continental shit about aided and unaided awareness. They just want to see revenue,” Russell says.  “Unfortunately, that’s where the call from the business for brand marketing to report hasn’t really hit a level of maturity.”

Marketers need to win businesses over one by one, she suggests, with the CMO working closely with the CFO to educate them on “basic brand metrics” and not the “vanity metrics” finance tends to roll their eyes at.

Only tenth of marketers ‘very successful’ at demonstrating brand impact

Of course, short tenure is an issue on both sides, as boardrooms cycle through execs at a rate of knots. Acknowledging it’s tricky for a CMO to influence their C-suite peers when six months later the CFO changes, Russell describes the need for education as an “ongoing process”.

When it comes to brand, she urges marketers to choose one or two “North Star metrics” along the funnel, decide what they really mean for the business and report on them all the time.

“I usually try not to have many more than about six along the whole funnel. Two at brand, two at lead gen and two at win rate,” Russell advises. “If you’re talking about that all the time, then the business starts understanding that language and it becomes the language of everybody else.”

Decide what matters to your business and stick with it is the advice. The CFO will then start listening because marketing is aligning brand metrics with the business metrics, she argues, insisting simplicity is key.

“I talk about understanding what your North Star metrics are and then making sure that everybody in the business understands and it must be simple, because they’ve got a million other things of their own to worry about,” Russell adds.

An impossible standard?

While at first glance the fact just 11% of marketers believe they can comprehensively demonstrate the impact of brand is worrying, that number could be interpreted in a different way, suggests Lucky Saint marketing and ecommerce director, Kerttu Inkeroinen.

She wonders if the low number is symptomatic of marketers holding themselves to “an impossible standard”.

“It depends on what you mean by being able to fully, robustly demonstrate. For me, that might mean that you can really show – down to the last penny – what the investment does to the bottom line. That’s quite the high bar,” she says.

Adding together the number who claim to be ‘very’ and ‘quite’ successful at measuring the impact of brand takes the figure up to two-fifths (39.1%), Inkeroinen also points out.

Size of business has a part to play. She notes that smaller firms often struggle with the scale and consistency of their investments, making it hard to invest in robust market mix modelling (MMM). As a non-alcoholic beer brand, Lucky Saint also has to contend with the issue of accessing on-trade data from pubs and bars.

We’ve let it be so polarised between the very short term and the very long term, we’ve just created this weird standoff.

Sameer Modha, ITV

“We rely on what I’d call the proxy metrics, so we do track brand awareness, brand attributes, social media engagement, rate of sale, organic search – all of those metrics,” Inkeroinen explains.

“Tracking those and being able to show that our investment is moving those metrics, I wouldn’t necessarily say that I would tick the box from being able to fully, comprehensively show how it’s translating to the bottom line.”

Another issue for small businesses to contend with is their growth rate. When a brand’s distribution and investment doubles each year, it becomes more challenging to pull apart what’s happening, even if you are using some form of modelling, she notes.

The longer time horizons brand marketing works to are also tricky. For companies working on a 12-month budget cycle it can be hard to translate what impact brand has had on that year’s bottom line. In that case, Inkeroinen suggests, it comes down to marketers positioning brand marketing as something that is going to deliver stronger pricing power or give the business the resilience to survive a recession.

Furthermore, Marketers need to ensure brand investment doesn’t slide out of the plan as the year progresses.

“It’s easy to cut from the brand marketing budget, because there isn’t necessarily an instant impact. You might say ‘We can invest in the next budget cycle’ and that might not happen, so you start kicking the can down road when you really need to be investing in brand marketing,” she states.

ITV looks to become ‘engine for growth’ with suite of new ad tools

Inkeroinen agrees that choosing the metrics that matter, and getting those agreed by both the board and investors, is critical.

“If you’ve got a board and investors who are aligned, they trust that those metrics eventually translate to the bottom line, even if I can’t show how exactly that’s happening on a day-by-day basis,” she states.

While there is so much data out there proving the impact of brand marketing, not least IPA Effectiveness case studies, the sticking point for some brands is not knowing exactly how this will play out for their business.

“They are still saying: ‘OK, that’s great. In 500 businesses, brand marketing is hugely important for your pricing power. All of the most successful companies in the world invest in brand marketing.’ However, they still want to see how it exactly works in their business,” she explains.

Going forward, Inkeroinen would like to see marketers gain confidence in their ability to measure the impact of brand and spark a wider discussion about what good really looks like.

Of course, making the case for brand can be an uphill struggle in some businesses and it gets to the point where marketers may need to decide where to focus their energy. Is that doing brilliant creative work that grows business value, Inkeroinen asks, or spending time justifying your existence?

“Do you want to spend most of your time convincing the rest of the business that your work is valuable, or do you want to work for a business that inherently believes in the power of the brand and where your work is the centre of the business?” she asks.

Meeting marketers halfway

When it comes to making the case for brand, Modha is clear the “jam tomorrow” argument won’t wash, as marketers can go onto a Meta dashboard and within five minutes justify their spend.

“I can justify that to finance, because I can say: ‘We gave Google £10m and they gave us £50m in sales. How can I justify this other weirder, fluffier stuff? I mean, I’m just going to look like an idiot,’” he says. “That’s where we’re trying to get telly to show up in those conversations and that’s where good old fashioned geo-experiments [come in].”

In 2023, ITV launched Geo-X, which provides tools, analysis and data to advertisers using the broadcaster’s regional footprint to set up geographic test and control areas.

“Regional testing is one of the oldest tricks in the telly book and yet it’s fantastic if you’re explaining to a non-marketer: ‘We did telly here. No telly here. Sales are bigger here and smaller here. Ergo, it was the telly what done it.’ They get that and they go ‘Alright,’” says Modha.

I talk about understanding what your North Star metrics are and then making sure that everybody in the business understands and it must be simple.

Mary-Anne Russell, Trinity Square

The broadcaster followed up its Geo-X launch in June this year with the release of a suite of tools, including Outcomes Planner, a planning tool that allows SMEs to forecast short-term metrics, such as web traffic, to support the business case for TV investment.

Based on 750 studies, the free tool is aimed at SMEs starting out advertising on TV. The tech allows marketers to predict their campaign outcomes based on different scenarios, such as budget size, brand size, campaign length and seasonality.

The June rollout included a new interactive ad format known as Lead Gen Ads. The technology enables advertisers to capture interest and qualified leads directly from a TV ad on streaming service ITVX. The broadcaster also unveiled ITV YouTube Affinities, a new means of targeting on the video platform supported by brand lift studies designed to measure impact.

Proud of the work ITV is doing to bring rigour to measurement, Modha explains he no longer tries to explain why ROAS (return on ad spend) and ROI (return on investment) are “terrible” metrics, because this is the vocabulary businesses use.

“[It’s about] going to where marketers are today and their lived reality, and saying: ‘OK, we’re going to meet you halfway, because we’re going to give you things that actually help you have those conversations with finance about in quarter performance,” he says.

“And if you want a ROAS number, we’ll give you a ROAS, but we’ll do it in a way that actually values our medium fairly. Rather than this sort of standoff.”

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