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The Marketing Architects
Advancing Marketing Effectiveness in the USA with WARC's Lexi Wolf
00:43:24
Only 90% of marketers see an ROI boost when they add brand building to performance marketing. Yet American marketers still struggle to prioritize effectiveness over efficiency, with many optimizing for lower costs rather than long-term business...
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- [00:00]
Lexi Wolf
After sifting through piles of evidence, winning marketing organizations are doing both brand and performance marketing together in order to succeed. Marketing Architects.
- [00:13]
Alina Jasper
Hello and welcome to the Marketing Architects, a research first podcast dedicated to answering your toughest marketing questions. I'm Alina Jasper. I run the marketing team here at Marketing Architects, and I'm joined by my co host, Rob Demar is the chief product architect of misfits and machines.
- [00:28]
Rob Demar
Hello.
- [00:29]
Alina Jasper
And we're joined by a special guest today. Lexi Wolf, head of advisory at Work North America. Lexi has spent the last decade working at the intersection of marketing research and strategy, helping some of the biggest brands like Spotify, TikTok, Amazon, LinkedIn, Coca Cola, and more understand and apply marketing effectiveness. She's also spoken at major industry events like Cannes Lions and the Ana Masters of Marketing. We're very excited to talk about our favorite topic, marketing effectiveness, with you. Lexi, welcome to the show.
- [00:57]
Lexi Wolf
Thank you so much. I'm so excited to be here with you. You guys do such an extraordinary job curating research and speaking it in, like, common conversational language. And I love the podcast, but I will say one thing. I'm a little bit nervous to be here today, and partially because you guys do such a good job, but also because I listened to the episode where you interviewed Mark Ritson, and he says that he listens to this podcast, and that has me intimidated because nobody wants to talk about marketing effectiveness to an audience of Mark Ritson. So, Mark Ritson, if you're listening, listen kindly.
- [01:37]
Alina Jasper
Just drop a couple F bombs and he'll love it.
- [01:40]
Rob Demar
You beat me to it. Absolutely.
- [01:42]
Lexi Wolf
Speak his language. Okay. Okay, got it. I'm learning.
- [01:45]
Rob Demar
Well, we're. We're super excited to have you here, Lexi. Now, you and I were both copywriters back in the day, so, you know, to. To quote the poet Eminem, you were in the lab with a pen and a pad at one point, and now you've sort of broadened your scope into the science of all things persuasion and marketing. What pivot for you? What compelled that transition from kind of being a wordsmith to now being all things marketing effectiveness?
- [02:13]
Lexi Wolf
Yeah, I don't know. I think, honestly, it was a very organic shift for me. I think I was just more thrown in the waves of the industry, and it carried me where it would. But, yeah, I think just as I've learned more about the industry, I started out in copywriting. As I've learned more about the industry and how complex it is and how much more there is to learn about it, I've just naturally gravitated like my sense of curiosity has just naturally gravitated me towards the research side and so that's where I've landed now. But yes, I'm definitely a creative at heart and I think that actually helps in the research lens as well to answer the right questions and to also bring it down to the level of.
- [02:54]
Rob Demar
A creative and how they would trying to simplify things.
- [02:57]
Lexi Wolf
Yeah, right, exactly.
- [02:59]
Rob Demar
So you've got both sides of your brain fired up.
- [03:01]
Lexi Wolf
The brain is fired up.
- [03:02]
Rob Demar
That's right, the left and the right.
- [03:04]
Alina Jasper
Well, that definitely appreciated. I think in marketing effectiveness, when we're trying to break things down, it's nice to have that skill of writing and communication for sure. Well, let's get into things. On this show we always try to root our opinions and data research and what drives business results. Not a problem for Lexi. Working at a company like Work and I like to tee up our interviews with a piece of research or an article. And today I couldn't resist picking one from Work. This is from Kathy Taylor. It's titled in the US it's time to talk about Marketing Effectiveness. She makes an important point. Unlike other markets, American marketers don't revere effectiveness experts the way we should. If you search Ad Week or Ad Age for Lesbinette, you won't find much. Even though his work has shaped how marketers think about effectiveness globally, instead we tend to focus on ROI and efficiency, often mistaking them for effectiveness. The US has some of the world's biggest media budgets, yet many brands optimize for lower costs rather than long term business growth. She also highlights a structural issue in many organizations. Marketing owns insights and analytics, which makes it harder to challenge bad assumptions. She argues that a more effective setup would treat marketing, finance and insights as equal players in decision making. So Lexi, that article, it's more than a year old, but I think it's still pretty relevant. And you and Work, you've played a huge role in advancing the effectiveness conversation in the US So how would you describe kind of the state of marketing effectiveness in the US today? And do you think that we're closing this gap we have with the rest of the world?
- [04:28]
Lexi Wolf
The American perspective. I'm always like, did my accent give it away? You want the American perspective? Because I don't have your typical marketing effectiveness researcher accent. Right. It's definitely a movement that is building momentum here, even just in terms of the phrasing being a little bit more part of our lexicon. When I started at work, that was a question that we had was like, does the word effectiveness resonate in this region. We talk a little bit more about impact, sometimes over effectiveness, but we're starting to see that shift a little bit. But overall, I would say that marketing effectiveness definitely carries different associations in other regions than we have here, especially compared to the UK and to Australia, where effectiveness discussion has really been embedded into industry culture through research organizations like ipa, Ehrenberg, Bass Institute that are really championing that and work. So I do think that we do have that big emphasis on efficiency. Right. We want to see returns really quickly. And a lot of the clients that I work with through work advisory, their key pain point still is around that pressure around roi. That's something we live and work under constantly. But that challenge is obviously not unique to our region. That's why that brand building and long term planning has been such an explosive topic of industry conversation and debate and continues to be. Rob, I know on, on the Nerd Alert podcast about the multiplier effect, you said that you love that debate and you hope it never gets put to rest because it's been. That fire has been burning for a long time and continues to burn. But there's obviously a lot of questions that marketers have now about whether those studies still hold up, like when as media continues to fragment and the playing field continues to be reshaped. And then I think in the US especially a lot of questions around whether that guidance is even applicable in our region because a lot of that data comes from the UK or from Australia. And so we tend to think we might be a unique region and maybe that doesn't actually work out here. But I will say I think we are starting to see a bit of an industry wake up call there. For example, I mean, just thinking of like the types of ads that you encounter day to day tend to be shifting, shifting gears and sort of their strategy. So for example, Airbnb's shift to more of those brand building story led campaigns that we started to see from them. Nike after Covid had moved like famously mostly to performance marketing and then very publicly admitted that was to their detriment. And that's shocking because Nike is known for their brand building, right? They have a stunningly good brand story with Just do It. And even they had been kind of lured to that performance advertising and are now coming out saying wait, wait, we need to change here. And I think we see it across a lot of brands like that. So that gap is starting to close, but there's still work to do in sort of seeing marketing effectiveness go from a niche discipline to an Industry wide standard.
- [07:30]
Alina Jasper
I love that Nike's going back to brand. They had their like first super bowl ad in a long time and I just loved it. It had like all those female athletes in it and I thought they did.
- [07:38]
Lexi Wolf
Yeah. And it's what, it's what we expect from them. It's almost just nurturing the relationship of how we expect to engage with Nike. So when they pulled back on that, it was just like a friend not texting back for a while. We hadn't heard from him in a minute.
- [07:52]
Alina Jasper
Yeah, you're right. Those like inspirational ads were so like core to who they were. Well, you mentioned that you were kind of debating do we use the word effectiveness? I'm glad you have because I think it helps us kind of match the rest of the world and I know that work is deeply committed to advancing marketing effectiveness, particularly in the U.S. so how does your team there think about contributing to the conversation both in terms of marketing effectiveness research, but then also helping brands apply it to give a.
- [08:19]
Lexi Wolf
Little context of work's kind of mission and where we come from. We famously quote David Ogilvie who said in 1983 that no other industry gets by on such a limited body of knowledge as advertising. We're always just kind of shooting from the hip. And that was kind of the rallying cry that started work we started in 1985 to really meet that challenge. And obviously advertising and marketing as a whole has changed a lot since then, but our objective has not, which is really to focus on providing marketers with the tools that they need to make better decisions. It's that simple. So we offer a lot of rigorous, we try to be really unbiased is our thing, evidence. And we offer expertise and guidance to help marketers achieve effectiveness. So that's through like a library of over a hundred thousand case studies. We have best practice guidance, research papers. We also have elearning and advisory services. They're all focused on helping to make marketers next decision smarter. So take some of that guesswork out. Helps to like map out what actually the landscape is so that they can make the next best step. But I think we have a really similar approach to you at Marketing Architects actually and how you guys approach it. We love the research, but a static data point has never actually changed anything. So we really want to break it down and make it actionable. I love your nerd alert segments. I think they're such a great distillation of what the marketing effectiveness conversation should be. It's presenting the evidence and then trying to break it. Down in a way that actually makes sense for us and how we can apply it. And so that's kind of our, our approach as well. Yeah, I'd say we fit right in with the culture of the nerd alert. If you spent a day at the work office, you would find some of the friendliest nerds around. That's really our gig.
- [10:06]
Alina Jasper
I love that you mentioned there a critique that comes out about up about marketing effectiveness, which is that the frameworks can be too generalized and it's hard to apply them because they don't always account for differences in my industry, the size of my brand, the specific channels I'm invested in. And I know you just recently I listened to a podcast episode this week. You had Felipe Thomas on the work podcast and he's someone who's brought up some of those concerns. Do you think there's any truth to that concern? And how should marketers balance these like, kind of sometimes broader effectiveness principles with the unique realities we face with our own brands and our own markets?
- [10:40]
Lexi Wolf
Yes and no. I would say I don't think the challenge is with the principles being too generalized so much as marketers not being equipped to apply them properly. So the core principles of marketing effectiveness, so when we talk about things like brand building, reaching broad audiences, distinctiveness, building, mental availability, those are grounded in empirical data. So we know that they generally work across categories and there's a kind of grounding truth to them. But where the critique really holds weight is in that execution. So what works in one category, one budget level, one competitive landscape, won't always work the same way elsewhere. And you know what? There's always outliers too. Right? There's always some rebellious, rule breaking brands that seemingly do everything wrong and they make it work. I believe even in those cases you can find those principles at work. They're just applied very differently or in creative ways that we hadn't even seen before or thought of before. So I think the point is marketers should treat effectiveness principles really as directional rather than something that's very prescriptive. They provide the starting framework, but that's actually where the real work begins for the marketer. So that's where you have to adapt based on your own brand and your business dynamics. It means testing and learning, measuring, rerouting when that's needed, and ensuring that you're driving the results that meet the objective that you set out to meet. It's about not just following a rigid set of rules, it's about making those better decisions based on evidence and the best marketers understand the theory inside and out. They understand that universal principle, but they also study the nuances of their own market, and they're using that to create their own combination and set their own path. So it's our work as marketers, all of us are having to be researchers. Right. And so that's really the approach that marketers need to take when they're considering marketing effectiveness. Read the research and then research how the research works for you.
- [12:41]
Rob Demar
Speaking of all that work, though, that needs to be done, I mean, you're advising marketing teams. You're. You're in the trenches with them. You're hearing directly, directly from them. The challenges. What do you think are holding brands back today? Are there any specific trends or challenges that are really standing out to you right now? Are you seeing themes across the different types of marketing teams that you're speaking with?
- [13:02]
Lexi Wolf
Yeah, it's a good question. I mean, obviously we're operating in a tough landscape. There's always disruption in the marketing industry. Right. So we have to be reinventing our practices time and time again. So agility is a really big piece of that. I think marketers struggle with being able to expand, experiment and adapt and change at the pace of the industry. But that's nothing new. That's how the industry has always been and it will always continue to be. So we have to kind of stop ourselves from just falling back on that trope of like, the industry is disrupting and we need to figure it out along the way. That's the game we're playing. Right. So I think the bigger issue, and I'm not the first person to say this, but I think one of the things that we really struggle with as marketers is we tend to be good at marketing brands, but we tend to be bad at marketing marketing. So at the organizational level, there's this misunderstanding of what the role of marketing actually is and what it delivers for a company. It tends to be seen as a cost to be managed rather than what it actually is, which is an investment that drives business growth. Right. And since it's not seen as that investment, it's seen as like a line item that prompts constant scrutiny over our work, over our budgets. We have to constantly be navigating that challenging landscape with limited resources and continuous scrutiny. That's what makes it really hard. And I think if we were to break through that a little bit better, we would see that kind of start to open us up a little bit. Because what's happened is that's really led to a lot of short term Thinking we're reacting to that pressure by trying to show results as quickly and concretely as possible. Which means we tend to prioritize the bottom of the funnel there. And we traditionally split advertising into those two jobs of brand building and performance marketing. And when I say that, I mean at any given time there are buyers who are in the market to buy your product right now. And you can use advertising to nudge those buyers to make that purchase. But there's also an audience of people who are not in market to buy your product now, but they might be in the future. And that's where that brand building works, can introduce your brand to them in a way that makes those connections, builds that relationship and that memory so that when they are ready to buy, they consider your brand at the top of their list. So that's, I think, kind of where that brand and performance debate stems from and why it's become such a long standing thing for us. It's that we're not always the best at marketing the work that we actually do.
- [15:33]
Rob Demar
It's such a great point. And I do think as marketers, for some reason we think we're so special that our situation's unique in this time period. But we've always been dealing with this disruption. So I think that's a, that's a great story to tell. That's the game we're in. I love that.
- [15:47]
Lexi Wolf
That's the game. That's the game.
- [15:48]
Alina Jasper
I'll say too, that's resonates with us because as a TV agency that's a challenge our clients constantly have is how do you present, you know, TV advertising which can be more of a long term investment? How do you frame it up? And I will say that the research does help a lot. We've been work subscribers ourselves for years and it's been really, really useful for us. And one paper in particular, you kind of mentioned it a little bit earlier and you're talking about brand versus performance. This has been making waves on LinkedIn and in the industry it's called the multiplier effect. I was hoping, could you walk us through some of the key findings of that report?
- [16:22]
Lexi Wolf
Yes, the multiplier effect has entered the chat, definitely. We've been really excited about this one for a long time because it really does stem from seeing that core challenge, that core need in the industry and wanting to address that. So we do a marketer's toolkit study every year. We studied thousands of marketers globally and we try to pull out what the key themes in the industry are and what we've seen year over year from that survey is that the industry is really facing that performance bias. Like that's not just a hunch, that's the facts. Year over year, we're seeing marketers report that they're investing more in performance and it's easy to see how they would fall into that. Right. It's because it's easier to measure, it's easier to connect to returns. And then they're doing that job of reporting that back and it's making them look a little bit better in the short term. But that's not actually the case for driving effectiveness in the long term. Right. And so in the multiplier effect, we call this the advertising doom loop. Lovingly called the doom loop. Just something to throw around in a business meeting every now and then. Are we in the doom loop? That's that once you convert those people that are in market, if you're only focused on that, then that leads your growth to plateau. And then we tend to optimize against misleading metrics that we often double down on that performance advertising to try and milk as much as we can in market. And since of course we haven't then introduced ourselves to those who aren't in market yet, we are at a disadvantage in the long term. Right. And so essentially what we're doing is short term optimizing ourselves out of long term effectiveness. So there's work to be done there. And that's what we wanted to address with the multiplier effect. We set out for this to be our 21st century case for brand building. And with this report in particular, we really wanted to focus on U.S. data. So we wanted to make that case that this is something that is happening in our region and how it can be approached from a US perspective. So what we did to build this report is we built a coalition of experts who can help us to make that case. So we worked with analytic partners. They have an ROI genome project that pulls the findings of their measurement programs for more than a thousand brands. We worked with BARA AI, they're a brand tracking company that they added a layer of business analytics that demonstrated effectiveness. We worked with profit. And they are an organizational advisory, they're advisors to CMOs and they helped us with that organizational lens in the report. And we also worked with System One, who are an ad testing company with a really widely recognized methodology that shows how creativity contributes to growth. So we pulled that coalition together for a year to create this report. And the conclusion that we reached after sifting through piles of Evidence is that winning marketing organizations are doing both brand and performance marketing together in order to succeed. So the first thing is that marketers see the best payback when performance led and equity led advertising are both part of the mix. And these are really high stakes for roi. So what analytics partners had concluded was that moving from solely being performance driven to a mixed approach of brand and performance can deliver a total revenue revenue ROI in the range of 25% to 100%. But the kicker is that the median uplift was 90%. So that's a 90% median ROI improvement from adding brand work to your performance work. On the flip side, if you go the other way, if you cut back on brand and move to performance only, you get a 40% median decline in ROI. So really key finding that this is actually something that's valuable, right? Super valuable. Another thing that we found is that strong brands actually expand the whole funnel. So data from Barra showed us that strong brand equity drives results across the funnel with more positive outcomes at every stage of the funnel. So that strong brand equity was moving the needle from awareness to consideration, from consideration to usage, from usage to preference, from preference to advocacy. So essentially, that brand is adding grease to the wheels of that marketing funnel and making every single stage more efficient. So I mentioned that we love efficiency, right? Like investment in brand building equity. And building brand equity is an investment in efficiency. And another finding is that strong brands strengthen your pricing power and therefore your profit. So another huge advantage of strengthening that equity is that it delivers stronger pricing. Investing in brand building not only leads to higher sales, but it also means that you can charge a higher price point for those sales and it makes consumers less sensitive to that. Right? And that's especially important during periods of inflation, which might be something that you're familiar with. I don't know if you heard anyone talking about that, but customers are generally more price sensitive. And so when you have that increased pricing power, it means less need to offer discounts, and that means you get more profitable customer acquisition, right? So all in all, those are some of our key findings. But that means the multiplier effect then is that we have to stop thinking in terms of brand or performance or even in terms of brand and performance. What we wanted to prove is that these actually drive results for each other. So it's actually brand times performance. That's the multiplier effect. That means an investment in brand is an investment in performance. And as that equity strengthens, it affects all elements of the funnel. It's not just a case of upper Funnel and lower funnel. But that this overall is the work that marketers need to be doing. It's one joined up approach.
- [22:18]
Rob Demar
So that is a lot of incredible findings. If, if you wanted to break it down for the simple marketer like myself, what are some of the practical applications of that research that you would suggest for folks like me?
- [22:32]
Lexi Wolf
Yeah, so part of it is just that I think we've tended to think of these as completely different practices. Right. So organizationally we need to reconsider how we think of it. We've even seen even like publicly there have been like Hyundai, I think had switched to having performance and brand as completely different functions of their marketing organization. I think that's something that we've really fallen prey to. So there has to be kind of this fundamental rethink in how we approach those practices and how we better weave them together. So breaking down silos and making sure that we're seeing that as one joined up approach. Another thing is to make sure that you're investing right? How do you allocate your budget so that you're unlocking that 90% revenue increase? Right. There's not a single like level of investment that does that. There's not a single correct number that really kind of is the key. But there's some fundamental principles, marketing effectiveness principles that you can consider as you make that decision. Something from the report we found is that a minimum out of every $10 invested in advertising, 3 out of 10 should be directed towards equity led. That's the brand baseline. But the most impactful advertisers were dedicating no less than 50% of their investment to brand and they often are investing even more than that. Right. So making sure that you're actually making that case internally so that the organization can approach this. Right. And then also invest properly is the first thing. Another thing is the creative, right? So going back to the creative side of things, you have to be focusing on your creative, on being able to do both those sides. So we tend to think of brand building as these emotional story led campaigns. We tend to think of performance marketing as these functional kind of reasons to buy. Right. What we've posed in this report is that you should make your creative do both of those things. They don't have to be exclusive to each other. So the way we talk about this is in focusing on building platforms, not just campaigns. So you need a creative idea that's big enough to be employed as a platform across different creative executions, that it's iterable, that it has that emotional brand building but it also has some connection to those reasons to buy now. So that means that you have to then take that brand idea, be consistent in that messaging and in what assets you're using to relay that story. And then considering that for a different variety of channels to cover your media mix. Right. And I think a great example of this that we've seen recently is the McDonald's famous orders campaign. I love this for talking about short term and long term because it feels like a really tangible one to kind of grab, grab hold of. But that campaign was rooted in the insight that everyone, even famous celebrities, have a go to McDonald's order. Right? You guys have, you know what your go to McDonald's order is.
- [25:23]
Rob Demar
Funny, you say this, it's a lot.
- [25:25]
Alina Jasper
Yeah, you didn't want to ask that.
- [25:27]
Rob Demar
But, but I'm gonna just for vanity purposes go with the two cheeseburger meal. But that's not true. It's far beyond that.
- [25:35]
Lexi Wolf
But yes, perfect. So what McDonald's would have done within this platform then is said, okay, Rob loves the two cheeseburger meal. So let's work with Rob as the spokesperson for that meal. We'll package that meal up as a limited time product and we'll invite them in to enjoy his meal. And it's such a cool campaign because you can see how it's really iterable across like a TV ad. You could tell a story there, but you also could just show Rob's receipt with his name on it. And you kind of get the concept too, like that's his order. And the object objective wise too, they're reaching different communities, they're reaching the celebrities following their fandom, they're reaching Rob's family and his neighbors. Right. But they're also getting them to come out and buy that meal and buy that product. So it's doing some of that brand building work of introducing to new audiences and also pushing that performance of trying to get the sale right. And of course this is a huge campaign for them, really, really successful. And I just think it exemplifies kind of what we're trying to move towards in terms of how we approach that brand versus performance conversation.
- [26:51]
Alina Jasper
I know Rob, that creative insight about how brand and performance don't need to be completely separate is something that we've believed as an agency for a long time with our clients and their TV campaigns. So it's nice to see someone like work backing it up.
- [27:04]
Rob Demar
We sort of always have taken the position that should be remarkable work that works remarkably, that we, we need to honor both Definitely.
- [27:11]
Lexi Wolf
Yeah, I like that phrasing for it.
- [27:13]
Alina Jasper
So, Lexi, I saw on LinkedIn, hopefully this is true, that the multiplier effect is just the first edition of what's going to be a larger project for work. Where do you hope to take this next? Are we going to see kind of a V2 of this report?
- [27:25]
Lexi Wolf
I love addressing the rumors. Yeah, we definitely have more in the works because this is just obviously a hugely resonating issue in the industry. There's a lot of different ways to cut it. So that's something our team has been. You probably saw what David Tiltman's post where he was saying, what do you guys want to even hear from us in terms of this topic? I think that's kind of where we are right now. We do have more in the works. There's a lot of different directions we're interested in building out the work. So right now our team is focused on a piece that's going to frame the work that marketers do in a way that makes an impact with the cfo. So zooming out a little bit and starting to help with that, that case building and the language that we use and the ways that we're able to present this internally to make an impact in the organization. But there's also a lot of different directions and a lot of room for product progress. So we'll be looking at things like measurement and organizational structures and really like a lot of different areas to help make sure that there's ample information on how to leverage the multiplier effect. But I'm curious, is there an angle you'd want to see or is there anything in particular that you feel like is a need gap?
- [28:37]
Alina Jasper
Well, we always lament the lack of TV research in the us. It feels like a lot of the stuff we pull and demonstrate to clients is UK based. So I'm always a plug for any types of this research that comes to TV, Creative TV's role in the marketing mix. I think we'd always give a plug definitely for that. But Lexi, one thing I was curious about is you mentioned like there are all these directions you could go, but when you look at the marketing effectiveness research landscape, do you feel like there's any areas where things are really lacking? Like places where you think like, man, we really need more research. I mean, we think it's tv, but what do you think?
- [29:13]
Lexi Wolf
Yeah, I mean, obviously there's always more to learn and obviously the industry is constantly being disrupted. Right. So there's always room to, there's always new white space, basically to try to fill. I think we have a really strong foundation for how brands grow, the science behind that. But for all the talk about the marketing funnel, personally I find that the messy middle is still really messy. So that actual customer journey that we're in right now can kind of be a bit of a black box. And there's not one singular linear funnel that consumers are using. Right. So I've seen it described more like a pinball machine lately where you just kind of the consumers are just bouncing from touch point to touch point and you don't really know where, when they're going to land, which feels very essential, astute to me. We're getting pieces of that puzzle that are starting to come together. So things like attention and how different touch points interplay and those types of things are starting to paint that picture a little bit better for us. But I would love to see those pieces come together into a more holistic framework of understanding what that messy middle really looks like. I think also zooming back and going back to marketing roots a little bit more, there's a lot to be said about the four P's as a whole. I think a lot of times when we're talking about marketing and marketing effectiveness, we're talking about promot. And so I think there's a lot of opportunity to talk about how we operate across all four P's in really joined up ways with the organization. So show how marketers really influence the business overall. So I think that's one of our issues right now is that CMOs typically have influence over promotion and that really limits marketing's impact. And I think there's a lot more discussion to be had there as well.
- [30:59]
Rob Demar
So for all of us marketing nerds out there that have been listening and salivating over all of this content and looking for, okay, there's just so much here. Where's the best place to begin to really dig into the nitty gritty? Do you recommend starting with a multiplier effect? Do you feel like there are other foundational reports that people should also be kind of incorporating into? The kicking off of understanding the complexity of all these topics?
- [31:26]
Lexi Wolf
Topics, yes. So as someone who was a creative and early in the marketing effectiveness conversation myself at one point, I think there's a few ideas, so I'm a little bit biased. But one report that I love that kind of, I think brings all of the industry thinking around marketing effectiveness together is Work's Anatomy of Effectiveness Report. It's a really great distillation of the fundamental principles of advertising effectiveness. So what we've done is brought together the top research in the industry and packaged it into a really simple framework that's invest for growth, plan for reach, balance your spend, be creative and plan for recognition. And I think it's a great framework to not only kind of take you on the journey of marketing effectiveness from investment to creative execution, but also within each of those pillars you'll learn all of the different concepts, the key concepts that drive the marketing effectiveness conversation. So when those things aren't that familiar to you yet, I think that's a great journey to go on and I highly recommend reading that report. So if you haven't heard of mental availability or prioritizing penetration or attention, these are things that come up in the report in a way that pretty linear and helps you to understand along the way. I would say though, one of my favorite places right now just for marketing effectiveness conversation is LinkedIn. Can I say that just following like leaders? You can say that, yeah. It doesn't have to be coming from some big effectiveness firm. I think following some of the leaders at those firms has been really helpful for me. Following marketing architects has been really helpful for me. That's kind of my preferred daily download. I feel like I get get really fascinating bite sized tidbits of research every day and occasionally when I'm lucky, I get a debate here and there that I get to watch happen. And so yeah, that's one of my favorite places too to tap in.
- [33:28]
Alina Jasper
Yeah, I agree. I know LinkedIn people have their complaints, but it's really amazing how I, I get nervous whenever Byron Sharp comments on one of my posts. But the fact that he's there, that you can engage with him, that he can do, he can critique. Mark Ritson's on there, I mean we're really lucky that they're active right now. I think it's a great place to go and learn. So one thing I have to ask you about is tv. I just have to, so we're a TV agency, you know, marketing effectiveness research. We like that it highlights TV as a high performing channel. But a lot of advertisers, they still think TV's outdated or too expensive for effectiveness. What does your data, what does work's data actually say about TV's role today?
- [34:04]
Lexi Wolf
Yes, it's a fair question. Right. We have a really hard time with nuance. Right. We like to speak in extremes. We idealize what's trendy, how a few years back Web3 was imminent and we were all going to be living in the metaverse imminently and you know what? Sometimes, sometimes I wake up and I wish I did live in the metaverse. But I think that it goes to show that we can't go following every single industry kind of bandwagon that's out there. Right? So the narrative around TV tends to come from statistics that TV's viewership is decreasing and its cost is rising. And while those are true, they're taken out of context of the bigger media picture and the role that TV actually plays in that picture. So while CPMs can appear higher than other channels, once you've incorporated the quality metrics that you're looking at, like attention, that cost picture looks a lot different. And so you have to be considering those. It's also a great creative medium. It's incredible for conveying your messaging, building those memory structures. It's a great brand building tool and it's got brand safety as kind of a really huge strength for it too. So the data shows that it still delivers really strong roi, especially when it's integrated with other channels. So to relay this back to the multiplier effect, which does touch on TV a little bit in the report, media channels like TV aren't just for brand building. Like we tend to sometimes pigeonhole them them. It's more double duty. So along with digital video, streaming video, linear television is among the top performers for short term revenue roi, even though those are usually seen as those long term channels. Another example that I loved from the report is that we tend to think of search as this incredible performance channel because it's given outsized credit for the outcomes that it drives because of last click attribution. But what we found in the report is that looking at channel interactions to see how they interplay, 30% of search interactions were due to other marketing activities. And linear TV actually led the chart for other media that initiated search clicks. So it's safe to say that TV's really still part of a well balanced media diet media mix. It's just one of those cases where you have to do deeper research than just the headlines that you see from being the TV experts. Do you think that's the story that the perception versus reality.
- [36:36]
Alina Jasper
Oh yeah. I definitely agree. That warms my cold heart to hear you talk about TV like that. It's hard. It's hard for us to do it sometimes as a TV agency, but I.
- [36:44]
Rob Demar
Definitely, I can see Elena taking notes.
- [36:47]
Alina Jasper
I love it. I love it. Anytime someone like work can come in and talk about tv. It's super helpful. Before we wrap up, I wanted to ask you, is there Any upcoming work, research. I know you mentioned the multiplier effect, those additions coming out, but anything we should have on our radar, you know, anything exciting in the pipeline.
- [37:01]
Lexi Wolf
I mean lots. Right. I think our editorial team is a really, really busy team working hard to make marketers lives easier. We are a sibling brand to Cannes Lions and so we actually work with Lions on building their creative effectiveness agenda at the festival in June. And typically after that we release a roundup of all the best effectiveness thinking from the festival. It's called the Creative Impact Unpacked. And I think that's such a great report. It tends to be a really exceptional curation of industry leaders latest thinking that they've brought to the festival. So I recommend looking out for that one. We also launch our marketers toolkit that I mentioned each and every year. It's our key trend prediction report where we basically do a huge study on and take the industry pulse across all of the potential influencing factors. So we look at government, economy, industry, society, technology and environment and we distill what's going to be happening in those spaces into key trends that marketers need to know going into the next year and more importantly how to use those shifts as opportunities for growth and then beyond like tentpole kind of moments like that that will be coming up. We're constantly looking at the industry through different lenses. So how is the search landscape changing? How is strategy changing? What's the latest that we need to know about? Attention. Our editorial team is across it and they're researching it and reports on those types of things are constantly in the rotation as well.
- [38:37]
Alina Jasper
We can't wait to read it. To wrap up here, I'd like to end on kind of a fun note. So Lexi, final question. If you could banish one outdated marketing idea or buzzword from the industry forever, what would it be and why?
- [38:49]
Lexi Wolf
I love this question and this is a question that I feel like we need to action these opinions because there's so much jargon and, and we're all so cultured to use these absurd acronyms and phrasing. Right. I have to be a little bit obvious and just say based on our conversation today, probably brand and performance marketing. Jenny Romaniak, the research professor and director of the Ehrenberg Bass Institute said that one of the biggest own goals of the advertising industry is the invention of the brand building campaign. And what she means by that is that we've really limited ourselves when we've branded anything as as being a brand initiative and divorced it from the commercial impact. Right. And on the Flip side, calling something performance marketing. What a cheat, Right? Like, marketing needs to perform, so it's gonna look good if you call it performance marketing. Right. So I think the dichotomy of those two things is just so obvious in the terminology themselves. It's just hopefully something that's starting to shift and that will eventually see the day that those start to be perceived a little bit differently. Although if it was up to Rob, according to the Nerd Alert podcast, those would never be put to death and that fire would rage on forever, right?
- [40:05]
Rob Demar
Absolutely. Absolutely.
- [40:07]
Lexi Wolf
Gotta keep a little drama.
- [40:08]
Rob Demar
Some healthy conflict.
- [40:09]
Alina Jasper
Awesome. Rob, did you have a word buzzword you wanted to banish?
- [40:12]
Rob Demar
Oh, yeah. Well, it's two words put together. Viral video. I'd really like that to go away because it has become a topic on a menu. Oh, we're gonna do. Do a radio campaign. We're going to do so. And we're going to do a viral video. Like, it's. Like it's an outcome thing.
- [40:31]
Lexi Wolf
Oh, good.
- [40:32]
Rob Demar
I'm glad you clarified it's a viral video because I was just going to make it a regular video, but now that you said it's a viral video. Great. Got it. So I think that speaking of viral videos, like, it's something you just ask your creative team to go and create, I think is obscene.
- [40:47]
Lexi Wolf
I also think saying viral video doesn't tell us anything about the video itself because it could be completely worthless, waste of time video. It could be really heartfelt story, you know, like there's no. It's just been mass consumed. And that is not. That doesn't. Yes, exactly.
- [41:10]
Alina Jasper
Well, fun. We all kind of took this a different direction. I have just one word, which is leverage. The word leverage is used so much in marketing. We leverage this, we leverage that. I know sometimes it makes sense to use it, but ChatGPT especially loves the word leverage. So if I have to read, you know, one more paragraph with the word leverage three times, I'm just going to. I'm going to die. Yeah, I need to think of another way.
- [41:30]
Lexi Wolf
Really good one to say leverage. Really good one.
- [41:32]
Rob Demar
Yeah, that's a good one. That's a good one. And so is over index. I like using over index right now, but a year from now, I know that one's going to age pretty quick.
- [41:41]
Lexi Wolf
It is these kind of these verbs, these like, insane verbs that we're cultured to use. And they do get into your blood. You read them.
- [41:49]
Rob Demar
They do. They do, yes.
- [41:50]
Lexi Wolf
And then you start using them.
- [41:52]
Alina Jasper
I know. Use it. I know I do. It But I hate it when I do it too. So I'm not, I'm not innocent, but. Lexi, thank you so much for joining us. This has been a really fun conversation. I personally really enjoyed it. So that's when I know this is going to be fantastic, going to be a good episode. And I'd like to say that when we. We did a rebrand a little while ago and Work also did a bit of a rebrand at the same time, and we chose, like the same distinctive brand assets and there's no one I'd rather share. Distinctive brand assets?
- [42:17]
Lexi Wolf
No, it's personal.
- [42:18]
Alina Jasper
Perfect.
- [42:18]
Lexi Wolf
Because we are building the marketing effectiveness memory structures. We've got that distinct blue. We are waving that flag and we're doing it as a team. So I love that. Yeah, I've loved being here with you guys. It's been so awesome. I'm a longtime listener, first time caller to Marketing Architects podcast, and so it was such a pleasure.
- [42:41]
Alina Jasper
That's it for this episode of the Marketing Architects. We'd like to thank Taylor De Los Reyes for producing the show. You can connect with us on LinkedIn. And if you like the podcast, please leave us a review. Now go forth and build great marketing.
- [42:56]
Lexi Wolf
Do you guys want to know my actual word that I wanted to use, but I thought it was.
- [43:01]
Rob Demar
Yeah, of course we do.
- [43:03]
Lexi Wolf
What I wanted to say was penetration, because I hate. I hate that we have to talk about that in that term.
- [43:12]
Alina Jasper
I've actually, I've thought the same thing.
- [43:14]
Lexi Wolf
It's a shocking word.
- [43:15]
Alina Jasper
It's a shocking word.
- [43:16]
Lexi Wolf
Yeah.
- [43:17]
Alina Jasper
It's an aggressive word for sure. Sure.
- [43:19]
Lexi Wolf
Marketing Architects.