Inside the Mind of Today’s Brand Marketer

CMO Council Survey Highlights Pressing Concerns for 2023 

By Deirdre McFarland, SVP of Marketing

Undoubtedly, marketers believe in marketing.

While they may be split on whether marketing is most effective for winning new customers, retaining customers or building brand loyalty… they wholeheartedly believe in its effectiveness. 

At the same time, only one-third of marketers surveyed by the CMO Council in collaboration with NCSolutions¹ are very or extremely confident that their marketing can produce the desired results they need. 

To be sure, marketers have faced a great deal of change and disruption over the last few years. To better serve the industry, we wanted to get a firm understanding of attitudes marketers hold about the challenges causing them the most grief. So we asked them.

Keeping up with today’s challenges has marketers second-guessing their effectiveness. We learned some of their major challenges include a lack of understanding of which campaign elements drive success, obstacles to in-flight optimization and the difficulty in evaluating third-party datasets.  Unfortunately,  many marketers don’t have a dedicated data science resource who can help them address these challenges and improve outcomes.

But these also rank high in capabilities that marketers want to improve in 2023. This makes sense. Most marketers we know are never satisfied with their performance for long. We think the results of our study highlight areas where brands can leverage partners, for example:

• Understanding which elements of a campaign drive success. Sales lift studies are available from partners (like NCS 🙂) who can provide detailed results that highlight the best-performing creative, audience, frequency, and platform. The results of these studies are used to plan the next campaign.

• In-flight optimization. Marketers can activate many optimization solutions on demand side platforms in the bid stream for programmatic advertising. These are turnkey and automatic, like NCS Buyer-Driven Bidding.

• Evaluating data sources. Evaluating raw CPG data sources requires a highly skilled data analyst. No wonder so many marketers are challenged by this! The good news is there are partners who have already done the heavy lifting for you and turned the raw data into insights. CPG purchase insights can be activated with an onboarder, or even delivered to your cleanroom specifically formatted for you. 

The rise of retail media networks, audience targeting, cleanrooms and campaign measurement round out the list of challenges we asked about.  Our report covers these challenges and provides solutions. Start your year off right by downloading the report today.

¹_{NCSolutions & CMO Council, Optimizing Outcomes in Media Marketing, 2023}