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Episode 106

Advancing Marketing Effectiveness in the USA with WARC's Lexi Wolf

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 growth.

This week, Elena and Rob are joined by Lexi Wolf, Head of Advisory at WARC North America, to explore how marketing effectiveness is gaining momentum in the U.S. Lexi breaks down key findings from WARC's groundbreaking "Multiplier Effect" research, revealing why brand and performance marketing aren't opposing forces but rather complementary strategies that multiply each other's impact. Plus, learn how top marketers create creative platforms that drive both long-term equity and immediate sales.

Topics Covered

• [01:00] The state of marketing effectiveness in the U.S. versus other regions

• [05:30] Why marketers struggle with marketing marketing itself

• [10:30] How effectiveness principles should be directional, not prescriptive

• [17:00] The "advertising doom loop" and how to escape it

• [20:00] Why strong brands make your entire marketing funnel more efficient

• [24:00] Creating creative platforms that work for both brand and performance

• [32:00] Resources for marketers new to effectiveness principles

Resources:

2023 WARC Report

The Multiplier Effect Report

Today's Hosts

Elena Jasper

Chief Marketing Officer

Rob DeMars

Chief Product Architect

Lexi Wolf

Head of Advisory at WARC North America

Transcript

Lexi: After sifting through piles of evidence, winning marketing organizations are doing both brand and performance marketing together in order to succeed.

Elena: Hello and welcome to the Marketing Architects, a research-first podcast dedicated to answering your toughest marketing questions.

I'm Elena Jasper. I run the marketing team here at Marketing Architects, and I'm joined by my co-host, Rob DeMars, the chief product architect of Misfits and Machines.

Rob: Hello.

Elena: We're joined by a special guest today, Lexi Wolf, head of advisory at WARC 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.

Lexi: 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. 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.

Elena: We'll just drop a couple F bombs and he'll love it. You beat me to it. Absolutely.

Lexi: Okay. Okay. Got it. I'm learning.

Rob: Well, we're super excited to have you here, Lexi. Now you and I were both copywriters back in the day. So, 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 persuasion and marketing.

What compelled that kind of transition from being a wordsmith to now being all things marketing effectiveness?

Lexi: 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 bring it down to the level of a creative and how they would approach it.

Rob: Trying to simplify things. Yeah, so you've got both sides of your brain fired up.

Lexi: The brain is fired up. That's right.

Rob: The left and the right.

Elena: Well, that's definitely appreciated. I think in marketing effectiveness, when we're trying to break things down, it's nice to have that skill of writing for sure. Well, let's get into things. On this show, we always try to root our opinions in data research and what drives business results.

Not a problem for Lexi working at a company like WARC, 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 WARC. This is from Kathy Taylor. It's titled, "In the U.S., 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 Adweek or AdAge for Les Binet, 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 U.S. 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 WARC, you've played a huge role in advancing the effectiveness conversation in the U.S., so how would you describe kind of the state of marketing effectiveness in the U.S. today and the U.S. economy? Do you think that we're closing this gap we have with the rest of the world?

Lexi: 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 WARC, 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 associations in other regions that it doesn't 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 championing that, and WARC.

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 WARC advisory, their pain point still is around that pressure around ROI. That's really 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 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 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 U.S. 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 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 and sort of seeing marketing effectiveness go from a niche discipline to an industry-wide standard.

Elena: 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 it was great.

Lexi: Yeah, and 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 them in a minute.

Elena: 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, like, 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 WARC 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?

Lexi: To give a little context of WARC's kind of mission and where we come from. We famously quote David Ogilvy, 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 the rallying cry that started WARC.

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 evidence.

And we offer expertise and guidance to help markers achieve effectiveness. So that's through like a library of over 100,000 case studies. We have best practice guidance, research papers. We also have e-learning and advisory services. They're all focused on helping to make marketers' next decision smarter. So take some of that guesswork out, help select and 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 there's 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 approach as well. Yeah, I'd say we fit right in with the culture of the Nerd Alert. If you've spent a day at the WARC office, you would find some of the friendliest nerds around. That's really our gig.

Elena: I love that. You mentioned there a critique that comes out 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 WARC 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 kind of sometimes broader effectiveness principles with the unique realities we face with our own brands and our own markets?

Lexi: 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.

Rob: Speaking of all that work, though, that needs to be done. I mean, you're advising. You're in the trenches with them. You're hearing directly from them the challenges. What do you think are the 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?

Lexi: 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 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 going falling back on that trope of like the industry is disrupting and we need to figure 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, and 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 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 work 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 longstanding thing for us. It's that we're not always the best at marketing the work that we actually do.

Rob: It's such a great point. And I do think as marketers, for some reason, we think we're so special at this time period, but we've always been dealing with disruption. So I think that's a great tell. That's the game we're in. I love that.

Lexi: That's the game. That's the game.

Elena: I'll say too, that resonates with us because as a TV agency, that's a challenge our clients constantly have is how do you present your TV advertising, which can be more of a long-term investment. How do you frame it up? And I will say that the research WARC does helps a lot. We've been WARC 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?

Lexi: 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 us 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've studied thousands of marketers globally, and we try to pull out what the industry trends 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 cause 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, you know, just something to throw around in a business meeting every now and then. Are we in the doom loop?

You know, makes things exciting. But 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. We often double down on that performance advertising to try and milk as much as we can out of the in-market audience. 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 optimizing 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 U.S. perspective. So what we did to build this report is we built a coalition of experts 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 1000 brands. We worked with Barra AI. They're a brand tracking company that they added a layer of business analytics 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 System1, 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 I can share a few of the juiciest parts of the report if you want to hear them. 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 Analytic Partners has concluded was that moving from solely being performance driven to a mixed approach of brand and performance can deliver a total revenue ROI in the range of 25 percent to a hundred percent. But the kicker is that the median uplift was 90%. So that's a 90 percent median ROI improvement from adding brand work to your 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 percent 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, and 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've 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 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.

Rob: So that is a lot of incredible findings. If you wanted to break it down for this simple marketer, like myself, what are some of the practical applications of that research that you would suggest for folks like me?

Lexi: 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, I mean, 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 and how we approach 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 percent revenue increase, right?

There's not a single 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. So something from the report we found is that a minimum out of every 10 invested in advertising, three out of 10 should be directed towards equity-led advertising.

That's the brand baseline. But the most impactful advertisers were dedicating no less than 50 percent 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 step. 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 of 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 jobs. 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 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? Rob, what's your go-to McDonald's order?

Rob: You say this a lot.

Elena: Yeah, you didn't want to ask that.

Rob: But, for vanity purposes, go with the two cheeseburger meal. But, that's not true. It's far beyond that, yes.

Lexi: 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 would kind of get the concept, like that's his order. And objective-wise too, they're reaching different communities. They're reaching the celebrity's 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 what we're trying to move towards in terms of how we approach that brand versus performance conversation.

Elena: 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 WARC back it up.

Rob: We sort of always have taken the position that it should be remarkable work that works remarkably, you know, that we need to honor both.

Lexi: Definitely. Yeah. I like that phrasing for it.

Elena: 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 WARC. Where do you hope to take this next? Are we going to see kind of a V2 of this report?

Lexi: I love addressing the rumors. Yeah, we definitely have more in the works because this is just, I mean, 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, I mean, you probably saw.

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 started to help with that case building and the language that we use and the ways that we're able to present internally to make an impact in the organization. But there's also a lot of different directions and a lot of 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 need? Gap?

Elena: 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, which comes to TV creative, TV's role in the marketing mix. I think we'd always give a plug for that. But, let's see. 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?

Lexi: Yeah. I mean, obviously there's always more to learn and obviously the industry is constantly being disrupted, right? So 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 and you don't really know where, when they're going to land, which feels very 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 understanding of what that messy middle really looks like.

I think also zooming back and going back to marketing routes 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 promotion. And so I think there's a lot of opportunity to talk about how we operate across all four P's and 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.

Rob: So for all of 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 the multiplier effect? Do you feel like there are other foundational reports that people should also be kind of incorporating into the kicking off of the complexity of all these topics?

Lexi: 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 together is WARC'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, like, these are things that come up in the report in a way that's 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 in marketing effectiveness?

I mean, 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 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 to tap in.

Elena: Yeah. I agree. I know LinkedIn, you know, people have their complaints, but it's really amazing how, I mean, 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 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, cause we're a TV agency, you know, market effectiveness research. We like that it highlights TV as a high performing channel, but a lot of advertisers, they still think, you know, TV is outdated or too expensive for effectiveness. What does your data, what does WARC's data actually say about TV's role in the marketing mix?

Lexi: 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 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 the 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. It's doing 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.

And more than 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 percent 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 is 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. But is that kind of the story? Do you think from being the TV experts? Do you think that's the story that explains the perception versus reality?

Elena: Oh yeah, I definitely agree. That warms my cold heart to hear you talk about TV like that. It's hard for us to do it sometimes as a TV agency, but I definitely love it. Anytime someone like WARC can come in and talk about TV. It's super helpful. Before we wrap up, I wanted to ask you, is there any upcoming WARC 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?

Lexi: 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 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 because 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. 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.

Elena: 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, you know, one outdated marketing idea or buzzword from the industry forever, what would it be and why?

Lexi: 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 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 Romaniuk, 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 being brand 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 going to 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 we'll 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?

Rob: Absolutely.

Lexi: Gotta keep a little drama.

Rob: Some healthy conflict.

Elena: Awesome. Rob, did you have a word or buzzword you wanted to mention?

Rob: 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 like, "Oh, we're doing radio and we're going to do a viral video." Like it's like, it's an outcome thing, you know, like, "Oh, good. I'm glad you clarified.

It's a viral video. Cause 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, yeah, speaking of viral videos, like just ask your creative, I think it's obscene.

Lexi: I agree with that one. I also think saying viral video doesn't tell us anything about the video itself, because it could be a completely worthless waste of time video. It could be a really heartfelt story. You know, like there's no - it's just been mass consumed. That doesn't prove to be valuable, yeah, exactly.

Elena: 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 gonna, I'm gonna die. We need to think of another way to say leverage.

Lexi: Good.

Rob: Yeah. That's a good one. That's a good one. And so is overindex. I like using overindex right now, but a year from now, I know that one's gonna age pretty quick.

Lexi: It is these kind of insane verbs that we're cultured to use and they do get into your blood. You read them.

Rob: They do. They do.

Lexi: And then you start using them.

Elena: I know I use it. I know I do it, but I hate it when I do it too. So 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 what I know it's going to be a good episode. And I'd like to say that when we did a rebrand a little while ago and WARC 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 with.

Lexi: No, it's perfect 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 long time listener, first time caller to Marketing Architects podcast, and so it's such a pleasure.

Elena: Thank you, Lexi. We'll include links to your LinkedIn, to WARC, to the multiplier effect, all of that in the episode notes.

Lexi: Do you guys want to know my actual word that I wanted to use, but I thought it was too much?

Rob: Oh yeah, of course we do.

Lexi: What I wanted to say was penetration because I hate that we have to talk about that in that term.

Rob: Hate.

Lexi: Yeah.

Elena: I've actually thought the same thing. I have some people at the agency that have like more traditional brand backgrounds, and they'll say that word and the whole time I'm sitting on Zoom, I'm just like, don't make a face.

Lexi: It's a shocking word, for sure.