Raising the visibility of marketing with the board

Marketing arrives at the board with awareness scores, engagement rates and a campaign retrospective. Finance arrives with a cash-flow forecast. Only one of those is in the language the meeting is conducted in, and it is not marketing’s.

The problem is structural, not rhetorical

The diagnosis that led to the formation of the Marketing Accountability Standards Board was a lack of reliable metrics connecting marketing activities and costs to financial returns. Not a lack of metrics — marketing has more numbers than any other function — but a lack of metrics that connect to value in a way a finance director recognises.

The consequence is predictable. A number that cannot be tied to financial return cannot be defended when budgets are set, so marketing spend is treated as discretionary cost. It is the first thing cut and the last thing restored.

What a defensible metric looks like

Two properties do most of the work.

It is standardised. A measure defined differently each year cannot show a trend, and a measure defined differently from the rest of the business cannot be reconciled with anything. Standardisation is what makes forecasting possible, which is what finance actually wants.

It is a leading indicator of value creation. Lagging measures describe a quarter that has already closed. Notably, it is often the CFO rather than the CMO pressing for consistent leading indicators, because those are the ones that inform a decision still to be taken.

Modelling the contribution

Where the data supports it, econometric marketing-mix modelling is the strongest available answer to the question the board is really asking. It separates sales into base and incremental volume, attributes the incremental part across marketing activity, and expresses the result against cost.

One detail matters more than any other, and it is routinely got wrong: optimisation decisions should be based on marginal ROI, not average ROI. Average ROI tells you that a channel has been worth doing. Marginal ROI tells you whether the next pound should go there — which is the only question a budget meeting is deciding.

Do not win the meeting and lose the business

There is a trap in becoming fluent in financial measurement, which is that short-term metrics are the easiest to evidence. The IPA effectiveness databank, built on close to a thousand campaign case studies, found that as the proportion of short-term activation campaigns rose, overall effectiveness fell; the best-performing allocation was roughly 60% brand building to 40% activation.

So the argument to bring is not simply “here is our return”. It is “here is our return, here is the horizon it is measured over, and here is what happens to the other horizon if we optimise only for this one”.