Confessions of a CMO: What I didn’t know about marketing effectiveness almost killed my budget

After 20 years in marketing, I thought I had seen it all but then…

I’ve led big regional teams, juggled brand, performance, and customer experience across Asia Pacific. I’ve launched award-winning campaigns, rolled out million-dollar martech stacks and reported directly to global C-suites. I was fluent in the language of marketing ROI, but I had a secret. For most of that time, I didn’t actually know what was really driving business impact.

I had an idea and assumptions, but I only knew what the numbers told me and - whisper it - the numbers lie. Not maliciously but because the entire system of measurement was, and continues to be, broken.

The hidden truth about marketing leadership

Let’s be honest. As CMOs, heads of marketing, VPs and directors, we’re mostly just trying to keep the lights on and every year, the job gets harder:

• New platforms, new formats, new tools.
• AI copy generators, AI media planners, AI attribution (whatever that ends up being).
• Tighter budgets, bigger expectations.
• More hats. Creative lead, content producer, tech stack architect, media negotiator, HR therapist.

We know our teams are stretched. We know the strategy is running on assumptions, but we don’t have the bandwidth to fix it. That’s the part no one says out loud, most of us are just keeping our heads above water. We’re reacting, not rewiring. We’re optimising the wrong things. We’re presenting clean dashboards to the board while quietly praying no one asks the one question we can’t answer:

What actually drove that result?

The UPS chatbot and the business case that almost broke me

Let me give you a real example. At UPS, I pushed through a transformation project to build a LINE chatbot for customer service across Japan, Thailand and Taiwan. I knew it would reduce call volumes, improve CX, and modernise the brand experience.

But it took a full year to build the business case across multiple markets, languages, and stakeholder layers, and another year to implement. Two years for one project but it was worth it. It became a best-in-class case study. The APAC team is still expanding it today.

However, while the business case was built on customer service, the quiet win was in brand. Across large parts of Asia, social platforms aren’t just entertainment - they’re service. Being present there forced us into relevance in a way paid media never could, which was great but here’s the truth: That was just one win.

For every big bet I fought for, there were five others I quietly buried (sorry team). Not because they weren’t important. But because I didn’t have the energy, political capital, or clarity to take them on and, too often, I couldn’t prove they were worth the fight.

The great paid search illusion (and why I clung to it)

You want another confession? Back then, I used to walk into budget reviews with beautiful paid search numbers. The ROI looked clean. The graphs went up and to the right. Everyone nodded. But I knew, deep down, that paid search wasn’t doing it alone.

Other channels were seeding demand; brand work, influencer engagement, offline touchpoints, all of it was lifting search. But the data I had couldn’t connect those dots or only some of them. So, I led with the metric that would keep my budget safe.

Now, 12 months into my role at Analytic Partners, I’ve seen the truth with clarity I never had before. Those “clean” numbers were a false comfort. I was building strategies on sand.

The 2026 measurement panic

Fast-forward to today, and here’s the part that genuinely keeps me up at night - we’re running modern marketing on broken metrics and lots of leaders don’t even realise it yet.

Let’s take attribution, which is still, somehow, being built on clicks. But in a world of AI-curated feeds, social discovery, and automated journeys with no click path, what happens when that last-click data disappears?

Social search is climbing fast, especially across Asia. On platforms such as Xiaohongshu, TikTok, LINE, or Kakao, where content is social-first not web-based, visibility is rising. But those views? That “engagement”? It’s rarely tied to an outcome, and certainly not in a way your current reporting can trace.

At the same time, brand contribution is finally getting the attention it deserves. But here’s the twist - we’re still trying to measure brand the way we did in 2012, with outdated reach curves, blunt awareness surveys, and black-box “brand uplift” reports. Let me summarise:

• Our attribution models are built on behaviours that no longer happen.
• Our paid channels are being propped up by organic influence we can’t see.
• Our social engagement has no line of sight to conversion.
• And our brand ROI is still based on recall, not revenue.

Feeling confident? If you’re not urgently challenging your agency, your insights lead, or your in-house analyst right now, you might be building your marketing plan on a fantasy.

The questions we should be asking, now

If you’re a marketing leader, I urge you to ask your team these questions as soon as possible:

1. What role did each channel actually play in this campaign?
   Did it drive awareness, action, preference, or conversion? Or did it just exist? Can you tell?
2. Did we hit a budget ceiling or is our message decaying?
   Decaying creative often looks like declining performance, but so does market fatigue, poor sequencing, or misaligned targeting. If you don’t know which it is, how do you fix it?
3. Are performance drops due to saturation or lack of signal?
   This is a common one. Saturation means you’ve maxed out your addressable audience. Signal decay means your media is no longer working the way it used to (think platform algorithm changes, format fatigue). Very different problems. Very different solutions.
4. What could marketing have reasonably influenced, given the macro environment?
   This isn’t an excuse - it’s context. If interest rates spiked, prices surged, or competitor promos flooded the market and your only lever was to “optimise creative” or “tweak bids” - was that ever going to work?
5. Do we, as a leadership team, actually understand what’s behind the numbers we’re signing off on?

If the answer to any of these is “I think so,” “not sure,” or “let me check” – that’s a problem. And not a tactical problem, a strategic one.

The uncomfortable leadership gap

Here’s another dirty little secret - a lot of us came up through creative, brand, or comms and we haven’t touched raw measurement in years. Now, we’re approving models, interrogating dashboards and defending effectiveness to finance teams based on data we don’t fully understand.

The pace of change in measurement is faster than most marketers can keep up with so ask yourself; do you actually know what’s behind the numbers your teams or agencies are presenting or are you nodding along, trusting the format, and praying it holds up?

What I know now and wish I knew then

Effectiveness isn’t just about proving ROI, it’s about proving what ROI was realistically achievable. It’s not about click-through rates or ROAS either. It’s about understanding the context, which means:

• The economy
• Supply constraints
• Competitor pricing
• Platform throttling
• Operational limits

Efficiency is what you control i.e. execution, optimisation, pacing, creative. Effectiveness is the outcome and whether it could have been different.

Where real leverge lies

In my opinion, the most powerful thing you can do as a marketing leader right now is stop trying to optimise broken signals and, instead, ask better questions such as:

• Is this a creative problem or a distribution one?
• Have we exhausted demand or just capped reach?
• Was this ever the right channel to begin with?

Remember, most marketing doesn’t fail because the work is bad. It fails because we misread what we we’re looking at and if you’re not absolutely sure what you’re looking at then it’s past time you found out.

This article was written by Nikki Taylor, marketing and communications director at Analytic Partners.