With marketers armed with more data and measurement tools than ever, Bench Media co-founder and COO Shai Luft has made the case for putting research at the heart of decision-making before media dollars are committed to ideas that might not work.
Marketers have never had access to more data, dashboards or measurement tools. Yet many of the most important marketing decisions are still based on four surprisingly expensive words: “We think it’ll work.”
We think the audience will understand the message, the creative will stand out, and the campaign will say something meaningful about the brand. Then the campaign launches, the media budget starts flowing and everyone waits for the performance data to reveal whether the guess was right.
It’s a strange contradiction. Marketers will spend weeks debating channel allocations, negotiating media rates and refining audience targeting, but can be reluctant to invest a relatively small amount of time and money testing whether the campaign they are about to promote resonates with the people it’s intended to reach.
I have experienced this firsthand many times. Research is usually treated as another step in an already compressed process, something that could slow down the campaign, complicate internal approvals or challenge an idea that has already gained senior support. Sometimes, if we are honest, people just don’t want to hear that the campaign they have spent months developing may not be as clear or compelling as everyone in the room thinks it is.
But avoiding feedback doesn’t remove the risk, it just delays discovering the problem until after the media money has been spent.
Even the best media strategy cannot rescue a message people don’t understand. Precise targeting won’t make an indistinctive campaign memorable, and a highly optimised buying platform cannot compensate for creative that fails to communicate the brand, explain the benefit or give people a reason to care.
Yet when results disappoint, the media plan is often the first thing placed under the microscope. Agencies are asked to adjust the audience, shift the channel mix, lower the CPM or improve the click-through rate. Those may all be worthwhile, but they can also amount to optimising the distribution of something that was never strong enough in the first place.
Buying more impressions doesn’t fix weak creative, it just gives more people the opportunity to ignore it.
And this is where relatively simple research can save marketers from making very expensive mistakes.
Creative testing doesn’t need to become a six-month academic exercise, nor should it strip every ounce of originality from an idea. It can provide quick, practical answers to some fundamental questions: Does
the message make sense? Is it relevant? Does it stand out? Is the brand clearly identifiable? What do people remember? Does the campaign communicate the attributes the brand wants to own?
Most importantly, it replaces the opinions of the people in the meeting room with feedback from the people the campaign is trying to influence. Research won’t always tell marketers what they want to hear, but that is precisely why it’s valuable.
The same principle applies beyond individual campaigns.
Many businesses conduct brand tracking once a year, if at all. That might satisfy an annual reporting requirement, but it provides limited practical guidance for marketers making decisions throughout the year. A yearly study is a snapshot, while marketing operates as a moving picture.
Consumer attitudes shift, competitors change their messaging and economic conditions affect people’s priorities. New campaigns enter the market, category conventions evolve and brands can become better known without becoming more relevant or more likely to be considered.
If a business only checks its awareness, consideration, preference and key brand attributes annually, it may not identify a problem until months after the problem emerged. By then, the brand has lost both time and money.
More regular brand tracking gives marketers the opportunity to see whether activity is changing perceptions while there is still time to respond. It can reveal whether awareness is growing but consideration isn’t, whether the brand is becoming associated with the wrong attributes, or whether competitors are beginning to occupy the territory the business wants to own.
This matters because platform metrics only tell part of the story. Impressions confirm that an ad was served, clicks show that someone interacted, and conversions tell us that an action occurred. None of these measures, on their own, explain whether the campaign made the brand more distinctive, changed how people felt about it or increased the likelihood that it will be considered in the future.
Marketing mix modelling doesn’t fully solve this problem either. MMM can help estimate which channels contributed to an outcome, but it cannot tell you whether people understood the creative, remembered the brand or took away the intended message. It can help show what drove performance, but not necessarily why a campaign connected with people, or why it didn’t.
We have become very good at measuring activity. That isn’t always the same as measuring impact.
The answer is not more data for its own sake. Most marketers are already surrounded by more information than they can reasonably use. In today’s fragmented and cluttered world, what they need is a clearer connection between audience insight, creative development, media investment and business outcomes.
Research needs to be much closer to the campaign process. Audience profiling, creative testing, brand tracking and campaign evaluation should directly inform media strategy, rather than living in a separate presentation or an annual report that is quickly filed away. Used properly, research becomes a practical decision-making tool, not an extra layer of process.
It shouldn’t be viewed as another marketing expense, it is protection for the much larger investment that follows.
The irony is that marketers are under more pressure than ever to demonstrate accountability, yet some of the biggest campaign decisions remain largely untested. In a cautious market, there is even less justification for spending hundreds of thousands, sometimes millions, promoting a message without first establishing whether it’s clear, relevant and capable of doing the job.
Research won’t eliminate risk, and it should never be used to reduce marketing to a formula. Great creative will always require judgement, instinct and a willingness to do something different.
But there is a significant difference between informed instinct and an expensive guess.
Before asking how efficiently a campaign can be delivered, marketers should first ask a more fundamental question: is this worth delivering at all?
