At B&T’s latest breakfast session — brought to you by Quantcast — senior marketers pulled apart the industry’s obsession with optimisation and asked a more uncomfortable question: what if efficiency is the problem, not the solution?
There’s a quiet crisis brewing in marketing.
Every dashboard is up and to the right. Every platform promises smarter optimisation. Every campaign is “working”.
And yet… plenty of brands still feel like they’re treading water.
That tension sat at the heart of The Efficiency Illusion panel, hosted by B&T editor-in-chief David Hovenden, alongside Chloe Jones (Head of Marketing, Princess Cruises), Dan Lee (VP Product Management, Quantcast), Gemma Poesaste (Head of Roam, Telstra) and Ed Raine (Director of Integrated Growth, Jaywing).
The premise was simple: if everyone is optimising, why isn’t everyone winning?
The answer, it turns out, is equally simple — and slightly uncomfortable.
Efficiency isn’t effectiveness
For an industry obsessed with metrics, one of the clearest takeaways was that we’ve become very good at measuring activity, but far less good at measuring impact.
As Poesaste put it bluntly: “It’s not that the numbers are lying — it’s that they’re incomplete.”
That incompleteness is where the illusion creeps in.
A campaign can look like a runaway success inside a platform dashboard — strong CPA, healthy ROAS, efficient delivery — while contributing very little to actual business growth. Conversely, brand work that’s quietly building future demand can be dismissed because it doesn’t spike sales overnight.
Jones highlighted the disconnect perfectly, noting that businesses often expect “phenomenal brand transformation to generate overnight sales uplift” — something that simply doesn’t reflect how people actually buy, especially in complex categories like travel or telco.
The incrementality problem no one wants to solve
If there was one word that kept resurfacing, it was incrementality.
Everyone agrees it matters. Far fewer are properly measuring it.
Lee pointed to the core issue: platforms are increasingly good at placing ads in front of people who were already going to convert. That makes performance look fantastic — but it raises a bigger question.
Did the ad drive the outcome, or just claim it?
Raine shared a telling example: a high-performing creative with excellent platform metrics turned out to be completely ineffective when tested with real consumers — most didn’t even understand the message.
The likely culprit? Smart targeting, not strong creative.
In other words: we’re rewarding attribution, not persuasion.
Brand vs performance is a false fight
One of the strongest threads running through the session was the need to kill off the tired “brand vs performance” debate.
As Poesaste neatly framed it: “Performance is the capture of demand. Brand is the creator of it.”
Ignore one, and you weaken both.
Jones echoed that reality from a category perspective, explaining that for Princess Cruises, the challenge isn’t just winning share — it’s building consideration for the entire category. That means working across the full funnel, from dreaming about a holiday through to booking.
Crucially, those effects don’t show up instantly.
Which leads to another industry blind spot…
Speed is distorting decision-making
Marketing has never moved faster. Consumers haven’t.
The panel pushed back on the growing expectation that campaigns — particularly brand work — should deliver immediate results simply because dashboards update in real time.
As Poesaste observed: “The best ad blocker that exists is still the human brain.”
People still take time to notice, process and act. No amount of automation changes that.
And yet marketers are increasingly pressured to optimise, tweak or pull campaigns before they’ve had a fair chance to work.
The result? Short-term noise over long-term growth.
Walled gardens aren’t the whole truth (but neither is anything else)
No one on the panel pretended the platforms were neutral arbiters.
Yes, they’re marking their own homework. Yes, they’re incentivised to make performance look good.
But the more nuanced point was this: there is no perfect source of truth.
Customer journeys are messy. Offline influence matters. Word of mouth matters. Context matters.
The answer isn’t to find a single “correct” metric — it’s to be clearer about what success actually looks like, and test accordingly.
Or, as Telstra has institutionalised internally: play like kids, refine like scientists.
The real job: reframe the conversation
Perhaps the most practical takeaway was organisational, not technical.
Marketers need to change the language inside their own businesses.
Less talk of CTRs, CPMs and platform metrics. More focus on growth, penetration, demand, consideration and long-term value.
Because as Raine pointed out, platforms will always present a “self-centred view” of success.
It’s up to marketers to zoom out.
And finally… stop doing everything
If there was one universal piece of advice, it was this: simplify.
Too many brands are spreading budgets thinly across every channel, every tactic and every shiny new tool — and doing none of them particularly well.
As Raine put it: “Why are you investing five or ten grand a month in SEO? Do it properly.”
Jones added: “Stop trying to be everything to everyone.”
Because in a world where everyone has access to the same tools, the real advantage doesn’t come from doing more.
It comes from doing fewer things — properly.
The takeaway
The industry doesn’t have an optimisation problem.
It has an over-optimisation problem.
Because when every metric improves, every campaign performs and every platform says you’re winning… someone has to ask the obvious question:
Why doesn’t it feel like it?
Top 10 Quotes From The Session (And What They Actually Mean)
- “It’s not that the numbers are lying — it’s that they’re incomplete.”
Most dashboards show a slice of reality, not the full picture. - “We sometimes look so far into the micro, that we forget the macro.”
Optimisation can obscure bigger commercial truths. - “Success has many parents.”
Attribution is messy — especially when things go well. - “Measure what matters.”
Start with business outcomes, not platform metrics. - “Performance is the capture of demand. Brand is the creator of it.”
They work together, not against each other. - “The best ad blocker that exists is still the human brain.”
Attention remains the ultimate constraint. - “Is the juice worth the squeeze?”
Effort and investment must justify results. - “Play like kids, refine like scientists.”
Experiment freely, validate rigorously. - “Nothing in this industry is set and forget.”
But that doesn’t mean constant knee-jerk change. - “Stop trying to do everything.”
Focus beats fragmentation.
