Earlier this year (2023), I authored a post shouting from the rooftops that paid media would finally be recognized as an unsustainable silver bullet in the marketing mix.
The post went something like this:
It’s a tale as old as time that paid media is seen as the silver bullet within marketing programs. It typically goes something like this:
A CFO agrees to invest $1 in marketing, and without any caveats, expects at least $4 in return (ROI). Traditional measurement mindset puts up guardrails for most revenue marketers as they build a plan that ultimately aligns with a trackable and scalable forecast for their business. In the past this has meant paid media.
And purely because of paid media’s perceived trackability, it has typically received the largest percentage of variable spend.
But it’s not really that simple.
Without getting into the attribution war (we can save that for a different day), we all know that the software-based attribution we’re basing our ROI commitments on is biased, flawed, and limited. And truthfully, buying behavior has shifted dramatically in the last 5 years with the rise of communities, social selling, peer networks, and of course, factors like privacy policies and ever-complex third-party algorithms.
Software-based attribution has not withstood the test of time. It actually hasn’t innovated at all in the last five years to account for buying behavior shifts.
Knowing all of this, and layering on the pressure all revenue marketers are feeling in this economic climate, means our hands are forced to identify a new path.
Gone are the days of relying solely on paid media for marketing success. My hypothesis is that people are going to start waking up to the fact that building an audience creates valuable optionality for your business, and this realization will give owned media its time to shine in 2023.
