Marketers struggle to balance long term brand building and short term sales [stats]

If marketers understand the need for a balanced approach to understanding performance, why do 40% of marketers still focus on short-term sales as the primary indicator of campaign success? Currently, only 52% of advertisers say they are confident that their organisation has the right balance between long-term brand building and short-term performance marketing.According to Kantar’s 5th annual Getting Media Right study, this is because a large portion of marketers still focus on short-term sales, using traditional metrics. While marketers know how they should approach ROI measurement, many are still missing the opportunity for real growth, said the study. Meanwhile, short-term sales provide a relatively easy and quick way to measure and that’s how many leaders measure marketing success.However, sales alone do not provide a complete picture of ROI, and unlocking extraordinary marketing requires a blended approach to measurement – the best of both worlds. This leads to marketers continuing in their struggle to measure and improve ROI. While a majority of marketers do measure at least some aspect of their marketing activities, only a collective 56% do it for most or all activities, indicating nearly half of the industry is lacking in understanding their performance and improving strategies and approaches.The primary blocker of holistic measurement and optimisation is a lack of consistency in measurement used to evaluate in and across channels and platforms. For example, TV measurement is still dominated by Reach & Frequency and Brand Effectiveness, while online and mobile measurement relies more on ROI. Marketers agree that blind spots in measurement, such as the walled gardens of social networks, create hurdles in assessing digital channels and cross-channel measurement.Many say they struggle with performance marketing as well because they have disconnects in strategies for reaching consumers, as evidenced in the 2nd and 3rd-highest challenges of understanding omnichannel behaviour and optimising their media investment.Younger marketers least convinced about marketingMarketers today might have diversified media, but the new play book for driving growth requires marketers to understand how ideas, content, and media can be activated to create holistic marketing – which in some cases might be lacking. Less than half of advertisers are confident in their ability to create insights from integrated data.Creating insights means pulling together the right information and tools to monitor and optimise campaign performance, but marketers struggle to connect the dots on performance across channels. This has caused a new generation of millennial marketers, in particular, to be not as convinced that marketing strategies are sufficiently integrated and that the media mix is optimised.With this changing talent mix comes a new group of marketers that have been immersed and influenced by technology and innovation. Younger generations of marketers recognise  the discrepancies in their organisations and the need for a more balanced approach to measuring performance of their marketing efforts. Millennial marketers put greater scrutiny on efforts by their organisations, expecting better integration across a growing array of platforms and channels. Meanwhile, Gen Y marketers perceives larger gaps than their older colleagues across several channels and cross-devices.Gap with consumersCurrently, over 82% of marketers think they have integrated strategies, but only 58% of consumers see campaigns as integrated. Marketers agree that data integration, such as unlocking insights on cross-device, cross-platform performance and unity between media and creative strategies, is a must-have for holistic measurement when delivering effective campaigns.Lack of access to the right data is further complicating the situation. While we live in a time of proliferated data, having access to the right data to create insights is critical. Less than 10% of the industry has access to all the data they need, meaning marketers need to quickly evaluate their data sources and create plans for collecting and weaving together the right data.