Your measurement results made sense in the room, so why has nothing changed?

Most of us have sat in the meeting where the measurement results go down well, the actions are right there on the slide, and everyone agrees it all makes sense. Then the deck goes out as an email attachment the next morning, and a few months later nobody can name a single thing that changed because of it. Clients and agency colleagues raise this as an issue frequently, and it has very little to do with the quality of the work.

Agreement in a meeting is not the same as a decision

When results are well received, it's tempting to think the hard part is done, because the analysis explains what's driving the brand and the recommendations are clearly written up. The trouble is that nodding along costs nobody anything, and it commits nobody to anything either.

The recommendations usually arrive as a list, with nothing to say which one is worth the most, which one is easiest, or which one the team actually believes. So nobody knows where to start, and when nobody knows where to start, the safe option is to carry on with last year's plan.

That's how a marketing effectiveness project that typically finds £1m to £20m of profit ends up as an expensive but academic exercise. The growth was found, it just never got picked up, and that leaves millions of pounds of opportunity on the table.

A big insight needs a small first step

Say the analysis tells you to increase your annual social budget from £3m to £5m. It's a good insight, and it's also a scary one, because nobody wants to be the person who signed off an extra £2m on the strength of a slide.

So turn it into the next best action instead. You believe the insight, but you're worried about the risk of going all in, so you upweight a couple of regions on social by £100k and see whether the scaling impact shows up the way the analysis says it will.

If it does, you've built confidence internally before going the whole hog, and the conversation about the extra £2m gets much easier because you have your own evidence rather than just a recommendation on a slide. If it doesn't, you've found out for £100k rather than £2m, which is a trade any finance director would take, so what have you got to lose?

Let the analytics size it, and let the team decide how hard it is

The second thing is to take every potential action from the project and rank it on value, effort and confidence. The analytics should show the profit upside of each one, and then the people who will actually do the work agree how much effort each action needs, because they know that far better than any analysis does.

Put the results into a simple matrix. High value, low effort actions go to the top of the list, low value, high effort actions go in the bin, and everything in between gets a proper conversation rather than a vague maybe.

This does something the deck never could, because the team has now built the plan together. It stops being the analyst's list of recommendations and becomes the team's list of things they've agreed are worth doing.

The real result of your analysis is what you deployed, not what you found

Once the actions are ranked, each one needs an owner, a date and a completion rate, so it's clear who is responsible, when they can do it and how far they've got. That goes into a simple project flow, and this is where it gets interesting.

You can now track the theoretical gain from the measurement against what has actually been deployed, which means individual actions can be held to account, and so can the project as a whole. Most marketing effectiveness work is judged on how accurate the analysis is, and I think that's the wrong scorecard, because brilliant analysis with nothing deployed is worth nothing to the business, while decent analysis with half its actions live is paying for itself.

The last step is the least glamorous and probably the most important. Link those actions into the tools your teams already use, such as Monday or Asana, so each action turns up in the actionee's to-do list next to everything else they're doing that week, rather than sitting in a deck in someone's inbox.

Change what you ask for at the start

If you're commissioning or running a measurement project, change the brief. Don't just ask for results and recommendations, ask for a ranked action plan that the team builds together, with owners and dates agreed before anyone leaves the room.

When the next set of results comes in, measure the project by the gap between the profit it found and the profit you actually went after. That gap is the number worth taking to your CFO, because it tells them whether the business is using its measurement or just paying for it.

Let's wrap this up

Marketing effectiveness can typically add £1m to £20m of profit, but only if someone picks up the actions and does them. That means turning big insights into small tests, ranking every action on value, effort and confidence as a team, giving each one an owner and putting it where people will see it. Open your last measurement deck and count how many of its recommendations have a name next to them today, and if the answer is none, that's where to start.