Everyone talks about marketing effectiveness. Few talk about how it actually happens. Here, Rebecca Ziantoni, business director at McCann Manchester and The Marketing Academy Alumni 2019, argues it’s less about dashboards and more about people, trust and collaboration that make bold ideas possible. This article is part of our Effectiveness Well Told series in partnership with McCann, a focus week exploring what effectiveness really looks like in practice.
Effectiveness is one of our industry’s favourite buzzwords. It’s on every slide deck, every pitch, every panel. But how do we ensure it’s not just talk?
The marketing effectiveness conversation shouldn’t just be about what the work does. It should be about how the work happens. When we ran the Effectiveness Well Told event, it wasn’t just about the theory, but the practice. The culture. The craft. It was a reminder that effectiveness isn’t just a KPI – it’s a commitment.
In an industry obsessed with metrics, awards, and ROI, we often overlook the most powerful driver of marketing effectiveness: the human connections behind the work.
READ MORE: Effectiveness Well Told: Prolific North launches focus week with McCann
Yes, effectiveness is about results. But the real question is: what kind of culture delivers them consistently?
Effectiveness is work that moves people, moves markets and drives impact. But the secret to consistently creating that kind of work isn’t just strategy or creativity. It’s a partnership and trust.
Effective work comes from effective partnerships
Effectiveness won’t work when it’s a department or a dashboard. It’s a mindset and a muscle. A way of working that’s baked into every brief, every day, every relationship.
Effectiveness doesn’t come from teams working on the business. It comes from teams working in the business, shoulder to shoulder with clients and their consumers, immersed in their world, invested in their success. Whether it’s a shift putting up POS in-store, or on the factory floor when a product is made, it teaches us more about a business than a PowerPoint induction ever could. These aren’t transactional relationships. They’re transformational ones.
- Creativity first. When deadlines are shorter and budgets tighter year after year, it’s easy to fall into prioritising efficiency over effectiveness. But when we build processes to serve effective creativity (and never creativity to serve an efficient process), we build chemistry and courage. Efficiency without effectiveness is a fast way to the wrong answer.
- Empathy fuels excellence. Client and cross-agency teams that care about each other – not just the job – go further. They challenge each other harder, support each other deeper, and celebrate each other louder.
- Partnerships built on trust, not transactions. When clients and agencies align on what success looks like, they can start building an effective culture. A shared vision creates momentum. Building that shared vision and creating an alignment of direction, not just calendars, requires trust and transparency.
Strategy + Creativity + Trust = Effectiveness
Effective campaigns are built on great ideas. Great ideas often entail risk, and people will take risks when they’re surrounded by people they trust. That’s why, despite being the least spoken about, trust is the ultimate multiplier:
- It lets teams take risks
- Offers clients and their agencies the opportunity to say yes to bold ideas
- Allows everyone to move faster, smarter, and with more conviction
For me, the starting point for working with any client is to make sure that it becomes the brand everyone in the agency wants to work on. A team that people trust will deliver best-in-class creativity day in, day out. Once you crack that, the chemistry and creativity follow.
We talk a lot in our teams about ‘double art on a Friday’ – a reminder that, for our clients, creative presentations, tissue sessions and strategic workshops might make up only 5% of their meetings in any given week. So, the responsibility is on us to make them fun, engaging and exciting – a reminder of why we wanted to work in advertising in the first place. A team that can deliver strategic prowess and creative firepower within a culture that feels like those high-school ‘double art on a Friday lessons’ is a team that builds trust, and in turn, effective work.
From campaigns to culture
It’s time we stop treating marketing effectiveness as a KPI and start remembering it’s a commitment to a culture. A culture built on collaboration, transparency and empathy.
A culture built on trust.
