Three uncomfortable questions marketers rarely have the time to ask themselves

Too often marketing strategies can become laden with assumptions and rote execution of years-old tactics. That won’t cut it in today’s marketplace, says Jonathan Rigby, chief strategy officer at IPG Mediabrands’ Initiative. You’ve got to revalidate your approach for 2025… and that starts with answering some tricky questions.

I may be about to tread on marketing’s hallowed ground, or you may find my opinions unpalatable. But disclaimer aside, if they make you pause and reflect on how you’re going to shape the 2025 plan with fresh eyes and an open mind, it will be worth it.

It’s that time of year, when we’re setting next year's priorities, budgets, plans, and partnerships. We need to make time to step back and sense-check the overall marketing trajectory. To challenge conventional wisdom and look beyond incremental performance enhancements or the latest tech fads.

And it’s harder now than ever. As the recent Harvard Business Review Analytics Services marketing report indicates, only 30% of today’s marketers consider their efforts “very effective”. Two thirds (66%) say rising complexity in the marketplace is making it increasingly difficult for them to deliver business value.

Which is why we’ve got to keep asking ourselves the difficult questions. Here are my top three.

#1 – How does marketing work for my brand, really?

Take a minute. Then ask yourself: how does my marketing actually work, how do I grow my brand, and what marketing models am I following?

If the traditional AIDA marketing funnel, now in its second century of deployment, works for you, go for it. If you’re a Byron Sharp disciple, putting your faith in a book first published almost 15 years ago, that’s great.

But a lot has happened in the intervening years to disrupt our markets: the explosion of algorithmically driven performance, a global pandemic, AI… So much has changed and not enough work has been done to question old conventions and design new models for today’s marketing landscape. We need to re-examine how marketing, all of it, the paid, owned, and earned kind contribute to business growth.

And even if you have a clear, data-validated model built and adopted by the C-Suite, is the organization rallied around it? This is particularly important (and difficult) if your brand and performance marketing are organized separately, or where creative, media, and customer engagement aren’t connected. Little undermines the efficacy of a marketing plan faster than teams pulling in different directions (or not pulling at all). Don’t accept a splintered approach – pull everyone together.

Agencies haven’t always helped their clients in these endeavors. Too often clients have access to a wealth of strategists peddling multiple strategies but receive no overarching plan. I’ve been at that table myself – as a data strategist, a digital strategist, a brand strategist, and a comms strategist. Each time I’ve had slightly different and potentially conflicting agendas and accountabilities.

This has to change. Whatever stripe of strategist your agency partners provide, all their inputs must inform and enrich the overall plan. A strategy that’s continually revisited, not something you set and forget. If you’re going to defy convention, your strategy won’t be an immutable statute but a learning agenda, with hypotheses to prove and experiments to run.

#2 – Am I outsourcing my marketing challenges to nascent technology?

We live in a tech-saturated world, and it's tempting to believe every answer to every marketing problem lies within the data points, AI tools, or analytics dashboards. But technology cannot and will not fix some of marketing’s most fundamental, and timeless, challenges without human ingenuity.

Whether you’re among the 51% of marketers already piloting or scaling AI, or the 34% struggling to keep up with new tech (or both), it’s vital to view technology as an enabler, not a panacea. Some of the most critical questions marketers face still require human intuition, emotional intelligence, and creativity. Questions such as:

What motivates human behavior?

No LLM can fully capture the nuanced and often irrational behavior of human beings; this requires understanding both human psychology and other factors, as Nobel Prize winner Daniel Kahneman’s insights on decision making demonstrate. While data can reveal patterns, it takes the expertise of experienced analysts to derive why people behave in a certain way. For example, why a consumer prefers one brand over another when the products are practically indistinguishable. Or why they suddenly lose interest in a product with no obvious cause. Understanding these deeper, intrinsic motivations – emotional drivers like fear, aspiration, or identity – requires human insight.

How do I build emotional resonance?

Technology can optimize messaging for scale and efficiency but might not pick up the nuances of messages that resonate emotionally. AI can create content but can’t replace the art of storytelling – which is crucial in creating brands that people care about. As many a critic has said before, there’s a real danger that if we're all leveraging LLMs that run on the same data, we’re going to get similar narrative outputs, and they're unlikely to spark connection and empathy.

It’s easy to think we’ll find the insights we need in the glittering dashboards of always-on data-feeds, but I guarantee you won’t unlock a new audience connection in cell B54 of your spreadsheet’s sixth tab. Discovering something truly insightful requires a combination of trusted qualitative and quantitative research, not just numbers masquerading as insight. Ultimately, while tech can guide you to ask better questions, only when paired with human ingenuity will it provide meaningful answers.

#3 – Has the structural separation of content and media forced us to choose sides, not build alliances?

We’ve artificially separated creative and media by giving them to different teams or agencies, but it’s time for content and media to converge in holistic strategies. Audiences feel like the connection point, with media teams and agencies sitting on a wealth of audience and in-market performance intelligence, but those same teams are often too buried in a precision-activation-optimization loop to contribute to creative concepts that will grow the brand, and business, over time.

I’m going to move beyond that age-old debate between the medium and the message and pose that we should be asking critical questions around how we make sure we use the creative assets we have. Or, even better, how we only make the assets we need. On average, 50-70% of creative goes unused. A conservative estimate puts that waste at around $75 billion per year globally, not to mention the carbon cost of production and digital storage. We could all use a bit more of that 'less is more' vibe in our content.

Managing local, regional and global asset production and utilization can be a logistical and governance nightmare, but media intelligence holds the key to optimizing creative asset sufficiency. It can determine the right mix of assets to deploy across specific channels for specific audiences. It can ensure they are tuned to the brand messaging in a way that complies with governance models and can enable continuous experimentation to tweak the asset sufficiency model.

These three questions may have subverted a few of your core assumptions. But I hope they also prompt you to revalidate your approaches – in collaboration with your agencies – and declutter the strategic agenda as you prepare for 2025.