You spend significantly on marketing. Do you know what it returns?

Most companies can't answer clearly. Not because anyone has failed — but because every other part of the system has a commercial reason not to make the answer easy to establish. Verso Insights doesn't.

⅓

of marketing budgets go to work that was never properly directedBetterBriefs Project

51p

in the pound reaches publishers in programmatic. 15% is entirely unaccounted forISBA / PwC

⅔

of British marketers cannot pass a basic test on the fundamentals of their disciplineIpsos / Ritson

The structural problem is wider than any single failure. Briefs arrive incomplete. Supply chains leak money. Standard measurement methods routinely overstate what advertising contributes. Budget allocation has drifted away from what the long-term effectiveness research consistently shows. Marketing decisions are increasingly made inside platforms the buyer does not control, and reported in metrics that do not connect cleanly to the way finance assesses any other line on the P&L. There are more.

None of this requires bad intent. It is how the marketing services industry has developed. Each part of it operates exactly as its commercial model rewards it for operating. The cumulative effect is that most boards are making significant spending decisions without an independent view of what the spend is producing.

The buyer is the CEO or the CFO. The CEO carries overall accountability for whether the marketing investment is producing what it should. The CFO carries the financial scrutiny — and finds, often, that marketing is the largest discretionary line on the P&L where the connection between input and output is hardest to verify, reported in metrics that do not connect cleanly to the way finance assesses any other part of the business.

That is the question Verso Insights answers.

What the engagement covers

Verso Insights works with companies where marketing is a material line on the P&L — typically £2M (€2.5M) or more in annual marketing spend. The engagement runs over four to six weeks and covers four areas.

Spend allocation

Every pound of marketing budget is mapped across channels, agencies, production, technology and media — and benchmarked against published evidence on what drives growth. The mapping often surfaces evidence of upstream/downstream disconnection — strategic decisions and execution decisions that no longer ladder up to each other. Most companies have never assessed the long-term/short-term split against the research.

Commercial reality check

The engagement assesses whether the business challenge is actually a communications problem, or whether the real constraint sits in product, pricing or distribution. If advertising is being used to solve a problem that is not an advertising problem, that is worth knowing before spending more.

Agency value

The agency relationship is assessed for commercial value — contract structures, incentive models, transparency arrangements. Not whether people enjoy working together, but whether interests are aligned. Benchmarked against ISBA and IPA frameworks.

Measurement and return

The measurement in place is assessed for whether it can reliably connect spend to commercial outcomes. This includes the platforms whose performance is being measured by tools they themselves often supply. Where the data supports it, an independent analysis is run using the same open-source modelling tools used by Google and Meta. A defensible range — the kind of evidence a CFO can work with.

The engagement happens once. Every marketing decision made after it is better informed than every one that came before.

The output is a report. It answers the question the engagement started with, sets out what should change, and the evidence behind it.

Engagements are scaled to the size of the marketing spend being assessed, typically £25,000 to £60,000.

Background

Verso Insights draws on twenty years of experience across client-side, creative agencies, and one of the big five media agency networks — working with brands including Vodafone, Unilever, Diageo, Coca-Cola, Microsoft, Meta, Lululemon and BoConcept.

The problems in this system sit in the gaps between the different parts. In most organisations, nobody's role is to join those things together and give the board a clear answer. That is what Verso Insights does.

More about the background →

Get in touch

If you are spending significantly on marketing and have never received a clear answer to what it produced, that is the question Verso Insights answers.

Book an introductory call

Or email keith@versoinsights.com