Advertising Works. But Not the Way Most Marketers Think

Advertising works. The evidence for that is overwhelming, even if the mechanism is frequently misunderstood. Brands that go dark lose share. Brands that stay visible through downturns recover faster. Brands that invest consistently in building memory structures tend to outperform those chasing quarterly conversion rates. The question was never really whether advertising works. The more useful question is: under what conditions, for what objectives, and measured how?

That distinction matters enormously in practice. I’ve managed hundreds of millions in ad spend across more than 30 industries. I’ve seen campaigns that genuinely moved business outcomes and campaigns that moved nothing except the agency’s revenue line. The difference was rarely the creative. It was usually the clarity of the objective, the honesty of the measurement, and the patience of the client.

Why the Question Gets Asked in the First Place

The scepticism about advertising tends to come from two places. The first is legitimate: poor measurement, inflated claims, and a creative industry that has historically been better at winning awards than winning customers. The second is less legitimate: CFOs and procurement teams who have been burned by vague agency promises and are now overcorrecting toward pure performance channels.

I’ve sat in both rooms. When I was turning around a loss-making agency, the pressure to demonstrate short-term ROI on every pound spent was constant. And I understood it. When you’re rebuilding trust with a sceptical finance director, you can’t afford philosophical arguments about brand equity. You need numbers. The problem is that the numbers most readily available, click-through rates, cost per acquisition, last-click attribution, tend to measure the wrong things. They measure the moment of conversion, not the years of brand exposure that made the conversion possible.

This is the central tension in the advertising effectiveness debate. The effects that are easiest to measure are often the least important. The effects that matter most, brand salience, category entry points, long-term pricing power, are the hardest to attribute to any single campaign.

What Advertising Actually Does

Advertising does several distinct things, and conflating them creates confusion about whether it’s working. At the most basic level, it creates awareness. People cannot buy what they don’t know exists. But awareness is a floor, not a ceiling. Beyond awareness, advertising builds memory structures: associations, feelings, and mental shortcuts that make a brand easier to recall and easier to choose at the moment of purchase.

This is the part that gets lost in performance marketing conversations. When someone searches for a product and clicks your ad, the decision to search was often shaped by months or years of prior brand exposure. The search ad gets the credit. The brand campaign that primed the decision gets nothing. This is not a measurement problem in the technical sense. It’s a category error. You’re attributing a long-term effect to a short-term trigger.

Advertising also signals quality and commitment. A brand that spends consistently on advertising is, implicitly, signalling that it expects to be around. That signal has real commercial value, particularly in categories where trust matters. It’s one reason why challenger brands that go quiet during difficult periods tend to lose ground to incumbents who maintain their presence.

If you’re thinking about how advertising fits into a broader commercial strategy, it’s worth reading the other pieces in the Go-To-Market and Growth Strategy section. The channel decisions and the strategy decisions need to be made together, not in sequence.

The Measurement Problem Is Real, But It’s Often Used as an Excuse

I’ve judged the Effie Awards. The Effies are explicitly about marketing effectiveness, not creative excellence. You submit a case that demonstrates measurable business outcomes: sales growth, market share, brand preference. What strikes you, reviewing those cases, is how few of them rely on clean, linear attribution. The best ones use a combination of econometric modelling, brand tracking, and business outcome data to build a coherent argument. None of them claim perfect measurement. They claim honest approximation.

That’s the standard worth holding yourself to. Not perfect measurement, but honest approximation. The problem in most organisations is that the measurement frameworks have been designed to justify digital performance spend, because that’s where the money went in the 2010s. Those frameworks systematically undervalue brand investment and overvalue conversion-stage activity. The result is a portfolio that skews heavily toward demand capture and underinvests in demand creation.

BCG has written about this dynamic in the context of brand and go-to-market strategy alignment, noting that the tension between short-term commercial pressure and long-term brand investment is one of the defining strategic challenges for marketing organisations. It’s not a new problem. But it has become more acute as digital attribution has given finance teams the illusion of precision.

The honest position is this: most digital attribution models measure demand capture more than demand creation. If you optimise entirely for what your attribution model rewards, you will gradually hollow out the brand that was generating the demand in the first place. You’ll notice it three or four years later, when your cost per acquisition starts climbing and you can’t explain why.

Short-Term Activation Versus Long-Term Brand Building

This is the most practically useful distinction in advertising effectiveness thinking. Short-term activation, promotional offers, retargeting, search ads, works on people who are already in the market. It converts existing demand. Long-term brand building works on people who are not yet in the market. It creates future demand by making your brand easier to recall and easier to choose when the purchase moment arrives.

Both are necessary. The mistake is treating them as interchangeable or, worse, cutting brand investment to fund more activation because activation is easier to measure. That’s a rational response to a broken measurement system, not a rational response to the actual dynamics of how advertising works.

Early in my career, I was handed a whiteboard pen in a Guinness brainstorm when the agency founder had to leave for a client meeting. I remember the internal panic: the room was full of people who’d been working on Guinness accounts for years, and I’d been in the door for a week. What I noticed in that session was that the best ideas weren’t about selling beer. They were about reinforcing a set of associations that had been built over decades. Patience. Anticipation. Reward. The advertising was doing something that a coupon code could never do. It was building a feeling that made the product worth waiting for.

That’s long-term brand building in action. It doesn’t show up in a weekly dashboard. It shows up in pricing power, in the willingness of consumers to pay a premium, in the resilience of the brand when a competitor runs a promotion.

When Advertising Fails, and Why

Advertising fails for predictable reasons. The most common is a mismatch between the objective and the channel. Awareness campaigns run on direct response channels. Brand campaigns measured on last-click attribution. Conversion campaigns targeted at audiences who’ve never heard of the brand. These are structural failures, not creative ones.

The second most common failure is impatience. Brand effects compound over time. A campaign that runs for three months and shows modest results is not necessarily a failed campaign. It may be the beginning of a memory structure that will pay dividends for years. Pulling it because the three-month numbers are unimpressive is like cancelling a pension because the first year’s statement looks small.

The third failure mode is one I’ve lived through personally. We developed an excellent Christmas campaign for a major telecoms client. The creative was strong, the media plan was solid, and the client was genuinely excited. Then, at the eleventh hour, a music licensing issue emerged that killed the entire concept. We had to go back to zero, build something new from scratch, get approval, and deliver on a timeline that would have made most people walk away. The campaign we eventually ran was good. But the version we had to abandon was better. The lesson wasn’t about music rights. It was about how fragile the conditions for effective advertising really are. You can do everything right and still have execution undermine the strategy.

That experience shaped how I think about contingency planning in campaign development. The creative is not the only thing that can fail. Rights clearances, media availability, platform policy changes, regulatory constraints: any of these can collapse a campaign at the worst possible moment. The brands that handle this well are the ones with enough strategic clarity that they can rebuild quickly without losing the core idea.

The Role of Channel in Advertising Effectiveness

Channel selection is not a media planning question. It’s a strategic question. The channel shapes what the advertising can do, who it reaches, and what mental associations it builds. Running a brand campaign on a channel optimised for direct response is not just inefficient. It’s actively counterproductive, because you’re training your measurement system to expect immediate returns from activity that is designed to work slowly.

The rise of creator-led campaigns has added a new dimension to this. Platforms like creator-driven social channels can deliver reach and authenticity at scale, but they require a different briefing approach and a different measurement framework. The metrics that matter for a creator campaign are not the same metrics that matter for a search campaign. Conflating them leads to bad decisions.

BCG’s work on go-to-market strategy and pricing makes a related point: the channel through which you reach customers shapes their price expectations and their perception of your brand. A premium brand that distributes through discount channels erodes its own positioning. The same logic applies to advertising. A brand that shows up exclusively in retargeting and promotional formats is training its audience to wait for a deal.

Channel strategy is one of the areas where I see the most expensive mistakes made. Not because marketers don’t understand channels, but because channel decisions are often made by specialists who are optimising for their own channel’s metrics rather than the overall commercial objective. The search team maximises search efficiency. The social team maximises social engagement. Nobody is accountable for the portfolio effect.

What Good Advertising Measurement Actually Looks Like

Good measurement starts with honest objectives. If you’re running a brand campaign, measure brand metrics: awareness, consideration, association strength, net promoter intent. If you’re running a conversion campaign, measure conversion metrics. The mistake is applying conversion metrics to brand activity and concluding that brand advertising doesn’t work.

Beyond that, the most defensible approach combines several methods. Brand tracking surveys give you a longitudinal view of how perceptions are shifting. Econometric modelling helps isolate the contribution of different media channels to business outcomes. Controlled experiments, where you can run them, give you the cleanest read on causal effects. No single method is sufficient. The combination builds a coherent picture.

Tools like behavioural analytics platforms can supplement this by showing how people interact with your brand after exposure, though they measure behaviour rather than intent and should be read accordingly. The goal is not to find one number that proves advertising works. The goal is to build a body of evidence that is honest about what you know and what you’re approximating.

Forrester’s thinking on intelligent growth models is useful here: the organisations that grow most consistently are those that make decisions based on a portfolio of evidence rather than a single metric. That applies directly to advertising measurement. Single-metric optimisation, whether that’s ROAS, CPA, or brand awareness score, always misses something important.

Advertising as Part of a Go-To-Market System

Advertising doesn’t work in isolation. It works as part of a system that includes product, pricing, distribution, and customer experience. A brilliant campaign for a product with a broken purchase experience is just an expensive way to generate disappointment. The advertising creates the expectation. Everything else has to deliver on it.

This is why I’m instinctively sceptical of campaigns that are treated as standalone events rather than components of a commercial strategy. When I was growing an agency from 20 to 100 people and moving it from loss-making to top-five in its category, the campaigns that delivered the most value for clients were always the ones where the advertising was connected to a broader go-to-market plan. The channel strategy, the offer, the timing, the post-click experience: all of it aligned. The campaigns that underperformed were usually the ones where the advertising was excellent but the system around it wasn’t ready.

The growth hacking literature sometimes treats advertising as an alternative to product-market fit, as if you can advertise your way out of a weak proposition. You can’t. What you can do, as documented examples of sustainable growth consistently show, is amplify a proposition that already works. Advertising is an accelerant. It doesn’t create the fire.

For more on how advertising fits into a broader commercial framework, the Go-To-Market and Growth Strategy hub covers the strategic decisions that need to sit behind any significant media investment. The channel is not the strategy. The strategy is what makes the channel worth investing in.

The Honest Answer

Advertising works. The conditions under which it works most effectively are: a clear and honest objective, a channel that is appropriate for that objective, creative that builds genuine mental associations rather than just claiming attention, a measurement framework that matches the objective rather than the available data, and enough patience to let compounding effects accumulate.

Most advertising underperforms not because advertising doesn’t work, but because one or more of those conditions is missing. The objective is vague. The channel is wrong. The measurement framework is borrowed from a different type of campaign. The budget is pulled before the effects have time to compound.

The marketers who get the most out of advertising are not the ones who have found a magic formula. They’re the ones who are honest about what they’re trying to do, rigorous about how they’re measuring it, and patient enough to let the work accumulate. That’s not a complicated answer. But it’s a harder one to execute than most organisations are willing to admit.

About the Author

Keith Lacy is a marketing strategist and former agency CEO with 20+ years of experience across agency leadership, performance marketing, and commercial strategy. He writes The Marketing Juice to cut through the noise and share what works.

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