75% of marketing and ad campaigns in 2014 failed to meet management’s expectations.

Recent research by The Fournaise Marketing Group measured the effectiveness of more than 2.5 million B2C and B2B marketing strategies, campaigns and ads across all media channels (traditional, digital, direct, mobile), throughout more than 20 countries.

The study identified what worked, what did not, where, when and why to help advise marketers on what needs to be done to deliver better results, performance and ROI.

Marketers made three critical effectiveness mistakes in 2014, according to the study:

1. Weak and unattractive customer value propositions (CVPs)

Nearly 90% of marketers and their agencies built and developed their strategies, campaigns and ads around CVPs, triggering minimal effect on their target audience segment. They wrongly focused on ‘how to say it’ rather than ‘what to say’.

Strategies, campaigns and ads did not directly answer the most relevant pains, needs, wants and expectations of the target audience. The focus was on style, look, feel, digital and social rather than around sound, scientific structure and audience-triggering CVP architectures.

2. Underperforming creative executions

70% of ads deployed failed to create a high enough level of audience engagement to generate solid incremental customer demand for the products and services. Fournaise found ads underperformed for three critical KPIs: message relevance, appeal and action and engagement.

“Marketers and agencies continued to believe that having high ad awareness is enough to call an ad or campaign a success even though hardly any (or no) incremental customer demand was proven to be generated by these ads and their high awareness”, Fournaise said.

3. Incorrect and/or incomplete data

Ads that tested positively according to markets and agencies using qualitative methods delivered poor effectiveness and ROI results when deployed.

Nearly 70% of marketers are inundated with data and reports but continue to ask for more research, analytics and automation providers. Marketers and agencies often use the wrong data for the wrong purposes leading to under-performing campaigns, Fournaise found.

Jerome Fontaine, Fournaise global CEO and marketing performance chief, says 80% of traditional marketing fails to correctly apply the ‘correct’ formula.

“To deliver results, effectiveness and ROI you need to follow the formula: you first optimise what you say, to whom, why you say it (and in which order), and then you optimise how to say it (and where).”