In their investigation of the world’s Top 100 advertisers, Rex Briggs and Greg Stuart revealed significant problems in marketing and advertising functions. The research included an audit of $1 billion in advertising campaigns where only 5% of the responsible marketing executives said they systematically used lessons learned from other campaigns.

While noting that the companies participating in the research “are probably better at marketing than most”, Briggs and Stuart discovered that:

• 19% of ads fail outright
• 67% could achieve significant improvement with no additional spend
• 36% marketing misses what motivates customers to buy
• 31% marketing doesn’t effectively convey the message to consumers

The most important causes of waste are: lack of solid business processes to deal with the complexity of marketing, lack of objective measurement of each campaign element’s performance, and a lack of a predictable means to improve results. For more information, read What Sticks, or see: http://www.whatsticks.net/whatsticks.php