Research
Marketers Believe in Effectiveness. Most Can't Prove It.
Marketing Week has just published the fifth edition of The Language of Effectiveness, its annual survey run in partnership with Kantar and Google. More than 630 brand-side marketers were surveyed between March and April 2026, alongside interviews with marketing leaders at Canon, giffgaff, Carlsberg Britvic, Starling and DHL eCommerce.
The headline finding is not that marketers have stopped caring about effectiveness. It is that most still cannot prove their own numbers, and the report puts hard figures on exactly where that breaks down.
That gap matters more for consumer brands than for most industries. A large share of an FMCG marketing budget sits in exactly the channels the report flags as hardest to prove: in-store activity, sampling, PR and out-of-home. This piece pulls out the numbers most relevant to a consumer brand and what they mean in practice. The original survey and its full findings are published by Marketing Week, Kantar and Google, and are worth reading in full.
Key Takeaways
- 71.7% of marketers say ease of measurement, not results, directly shaped where they put their budget over the past year.
- 76.8% call social media easy to measure, versus just 20.8% for outdoor. The channels that are easiest to prove are the ones that keep getting funded.
- 69% say creative is one of the most important drivers of effectiveness, but 47.9% have no clear way to measure it.
- 91.4% believe strong brands can charge more, but only 9% can strongly prove that link, and just 42.4% can prove it at all.
- 71.1% see a gap between how marketing defines effectiveness and how their CEO or CFO does (Marketing Week, Kantar & Google, The Language of Effectiveness 2026).
Budgets Are Following What's Provable, Not What Works
The report's central finding is simple to state and uncomfortable to sit with: 71.7% of marketers admit that ease of measurement, rather than actual performance, shaped where they put their budget this year. Social media (76.8%) and direct marketing (70.5%) are rated easy to measure. Outdoor and PR are not, with 20.8% and well under half of marketers able to say the same of those channels.
The knock-on effect shows up in where the money moved. 28% of marketers shifted more focus to performance marketing this year, against 23% who shifted more focus to brand-building. Carlsberg Britvic's CMO, Munnawar Chishty, put it plainly in the report: the risk is when ease of measurement becomes a proxy for effectiveness, and over-indexing on measurable activity leads to underinvestment in brand building.
For a consumer brand, this bias is not abstract. In-store activity, sampling, PR and out-of-home are exactly the channels the report says are hardest to prove, and they are also where a large share of FMCG marketing spend actually happens. When a channel cannot show its working, it loses the argument in the next budget meeting regardless of what it actually drove. This is the same pattern behind what we have called the retail attribution gap: brands can see what an ad cost, far less often what it sold.
Creative Is Agreed to Matter and Still Isn't Measured
Creative effectiveness is a measure of how much of a campaign's result comes from the creative itself, the advert, the message, the imagery, rather than from the media plan that carried it. It is the difference between knowing where a campaign ran and knowing whether the advert people actually saw did any work.
69% of marketers call creative effectiveness one of the most important drivers of results. Under half, 47.9%, say they have no clear way to measure whether it is working, and 51.3% call measuring creative "challenging" or "very challenging." A/B testing (58.1%) and focus groups (38.9%) remain the most-used tools; AI-based creative testing is growing but still only used by 21.1% of marketers.
The pattern is consistent with the rest of the report. The thing marketers agree matters most is also the hardest thing to prove, which makes it the easiest thing to cut when budgets tighten.
Pricing Power Is Believed In. It Is Rarely Proven.
91.4% of marketers agree that strong brands can charge higher prices, and just over half agree strongly. Ask them to prove the mechanism and the confidence collapses: only 42.4% say they can quantify the link between brand strength and price elasticity at all, and just 9% say they can do so strongly. The most common tactics for building pricing power are communicating value (70.1%), investing in brand (48.1%) and improving product quality (34%), well ahead of tiered pricing at 19.6%.
This gap is worth sitting with for a consumer brand specifically. Private label now holds 38.1% of the European grocery market by value (NielsenIQ, 2024), and that share keeps climbing. A brand's ability to hold its price against a cheaper own-label alternative is exactly the kind of pricing power the report is describing, and almost nobody in the survey can put a number on it. Canon's approach, cited in the report, leans on selective, story-led pricing tied to real moments rather than blanket discounting, which is a reasonable proxy in the absence of a cleaner measurement.
Marketing and the C-Suite Are Tracking Two Different Businesses
This is the sharpest finding in the report. 71.1% of marketers see a real disconnect between how marketing defines effectiveness and how the rest of the business does. Marketers rank leads generated (76.8%) and click-through rate (71.6%) as their top measures of success. CEOs and CFOs rank new customer acquisition (56.4%) and ROI (50%) as theirs. One side is reporting activity. The other is asking for outcomes.
DHL eCommerce's Lee Nelson makes the point directly in the report: marketing has not always had a seat at the table, and it needs to speak in terms a CFO understands. giffgaff's Georgina Bramall describes the alternative in practice, where marketing performance is discussed in every trading meeting alongside commercial and product numbers, and business cases are built jointly with finance rather than presented after the fact. The reward for closing that gap is measurable: 51.2% of marketers who focused on effectiveness saw their budget grow, by up to 25%, over two years.
What we find: the marketers who close this gap fastest are usually the ones already reporting in the C-suite's own terms, a verified new customer and a calculated return, rather than translating platform metrics after the fact. A receipt-verified sale does not need translating. A verified purchase is a new customer number by definition, in the language the CFO already asked for.
Why This Lands Harder for Consumer Brands
Put the four findings together and a consumer brand faces a specific version of this problem, sharper than most other industries feel it. A large share of FMCG spend sits in the channels the report calls hardest to measure. Pricing power is something almost every FMCG marketer believes in and almost none can prove, at the exact moment private label is taking more shelf space. And the actual commercial outcome that finance cares about, a shopper buying the product, sits one step removed from the platform metrics marketing is reporting on.
None of this is a reason to stop running the channels that are hard to measure. In-store activity, sampling and PR still work. It is a reason to be honest, in the next budget meeting, about which numbers are proving impact and which are proxies for it. The report's own finding is that the marketers who make that distinction are the ones whose budgets grow.