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In short: Glenn Donaldson argues that marketing is business work - how an organisation is set up to deliver its strategy - and that a marketing function should be judged on documented evidence of its capability, as other business functions are. Judging marketing on campaign results alone gives a false read, because results also reflect market conditions and luck.
“So, what’s the campaign idea?” When I started Revellion as a marketing consultancy, that was where almost every client conversation began. What’s the idea, what does the ad look like. I’d worked in marketing long enough not to be surprised, but the longer I sat with it in my own business, the more it frustrated me, because it wasn’t just my clients. Across the industry, nearly nine in ten marketers have a say in advertising and promotion, while only about a quarter have any say in pricing, and fewer still in distribution [1].
Ask most people, including plenty who run businesses, what marketing is, and they'll describe advertising - the creative, the thing you can point at.
The creative is an outcome. The work is whatever produces it, and that’s the part I find more interesting - and the part few outside the function discuss: the inefficiencies when a marketing function isn’t operating well, the brief that produces, the endless back-and-forth between client and agency over the minutiae of a creative solution. Even inside the profession, creative usually gets more of the airtime.
I’ve lived the other side. I’ve been on set for the shoot, in the studio for the voiceover, in the room developing the idea. It’s fun for a while, but after years of it the novelty wore thin in a way that surprised me. Underneath every one of those sessions sat a bigger question, and one I found far more interesting: is the system that produced this working?
Marketing is business work - strategy, structure and systems. It’s how an organisation is set up to deliver on what it’s meant to deliver.
Revellion starts from a different question to “what should the ad say.” I want to know how the business is set up to deliver its strategic goals, and where marketing sits inside that machine. Getting that architecture right is a completely different discipline to producing creative.
Some of that work never reaches a boardroom conversation, let alone a case study: building the function’s capability and showing the uplift rather than assuming it, designing and buying the technology stack the function will run on for years, reprioritising strategy when the environment shifts. Campaign reports rarely put a number on any of it, yet it decides whether the whole system improves over time or keeps producing the same result while getting slower and more expensive to run.
Marketing is being asked to do more and prove more, with less resource and less time. Budgets have stayed flat at 7.8% of company revenue, and 56% of CMOs say that isn’t enough to deliver their strategy [2]. And most of the time, marketing is judged on the outcome alone.
That gives a false read of the function. The result comes out of the whole system - strategy, structure, people, process and technology - plus market conditions and luck. A strong result can hide a fragile system, and a poor one can mask a capable team having a bad quarter. Psychologists call this outcome bias: we judge a decision by how it turned out, even when chance decided the result. Shown the identical decision, people rate it as better when told it succeeded than when told it failed [3]. In marketing, a campaign that lands on a competitor’s stumble takes the credit, and one that misses on an interest rate rise takes the blame.
I’ve seen a great sales result credited to a repeated campaign and unchanged channel flighting, signed off by a sophisticated econometric model, while the weaknesses underneath went unexamined. The complacency a result like that breeds only makes the problem worse.
What decides the next result is the inputs. McKinsey research found companies with top-quartile marketing and sales capabilities grow revenue around 30% faster than their sector peers [4]. Yet marketers use only 49% of their martech stack’s capability, down from 58% in 2020 [5], and with AI and new tools changing those inputs faster than any campaign report can show, the gap keeps widening.
What concerns me most, working across all of this, is how little end-to-end diagnostic work happens in marketing. Businesses will commission a market study, a brand refresh, a campaign review - often at real cost - but in my experience a structured, evidence-based read of whether the marketing function can do what the business needs is rare. A global survey of 633 senior marketing leaders found only 7% feel fully equipped to deliver marketing effectiveness [6]. When an assessment does happen, it’s usually a conversation rather than an audit - an impression, a vibe.
That’s where the line I now structure my work around came from: Evidence, not vibes.
Marketing is being trusted with more of the business’s expectations, and that trust should rest on documented evidence of capability, judged the way any other critical business function is judged, rather than on how confident the room feels.
If the loudest opinion in the room still counts for as much as the senior marketer’s, the function has little chance of earning the influence it’s asking for. Only 15% of CEOs gave their marketing leader an A for performance in 2026, down from 24% a year earlier [7]. I’d put that down less to marketers failing to make their case, and more to leadership failing to hold the standard marketing is judged against.
When marketing can demonstrate its value on a measure that holds up under scrutiny, and is seen as a well-run, even standout part of the business, credibility gets built rather than argued for. The marketer stops re-arguing the budget every planning cycle and becomes someone the business consults before it sets direction.
Done well, marketing’s read on the customer stops being confined to advertising and starts shaping how the whole organisation develops. Most marketers aren’t given that role today. They earn it over time, the way any other function earns its influence - on evidence.
This work is for the senior marketer first. They need it most, and they fear it most. They want a credible plan for building capability while the business keeps running, and they fear a diagnostic report that reads as a scorecard and, in the wrong hands, becomes a weapon. That fear is reasonable - documenting your own gaps has a cost - but it’s a necessary step toward credibility.
It’s also the marketer’s best defence. The CEO will reach for the return, and the board for assurance that a plan exists and the business is protected. Neither usually asks whether the system that produced the last result can produce the next one. Independent evidence and a repeatable method built for governance give the marketer an answer to both, grounded in evidence rather than the loudest opinion in the room.
Evidence, not vibes, has to hold for whoever's reading it.
The ground is moving faster than most functions are built to track. AI adoption in marketing is still early: 83% of Australian marketing teams remain at an early stage of AI maturity, and none sampled had reached the top two of six levels [8]. Meanwhile the martech landscape has grown from around 150 products in 2011 to over 15,000 by 2025 [9], and that peak is arriving just as an AI investment wave hits teams that mostly aren’t structured to absorb it.
A capability gap that used to open slowly now widens by the quarter.
When a business does look under the bonnet of its marketing function today, it usually has two options. An agency audit tends to end in a recommendation for the agency’s own services; a maturity survey hands back a score and stops there. Neither tells you, on evidence, whether the function can deliver what the business needs next, or what to do about it.
That’s why I built Revellion, which works in three connected phases. Reveal is the diagnostic: four pillars - strategy, structure, capability, and resources and operations - plus a dedicated AI readiness assessment. Every score is traced to evidence of what exists, how good it is and whether it’s used - drawn from the organisation’s documents and practice, and from independent market evidence, not self-report. The long-term brand effects that take years to show count as part of the capability, even though they’re harder to measure. Resolve turns the diagnosis into a plan. Where the business needs one, Resolve first develops the strategy marketing will work to, then assesses people and technology against it, because nobody can be judged capable until what they need to be capable of is defined. Rebuild closes the gaps that matter, in the order that holds.
What you end up with is a marketing function that can show, on evidence, that it’s capable of delivering the next result, as well as account for the last one.
Revellion | Evidence, not vibes | revellion.com.au
If you'd like to see how Revellion approaches this, read about the approach or get in touch.
References
[1] Marketing Week, Career & Salary Survey 2026.
[2] Gartner, 2026 CMO Spend Survey.
[3] Baron, J. & Hershey, J. (1988), Outcome bias in decision evaluation; replicated by Feldman et al. (2023), International Review of Social Psychology.
[4] McKinsey & Company, Building marketing and sales capabilities to beat the market.
[5] Gartner, 2025 Marketing Technology Survey.
[6] GfK, CMO Survey 2023.
[7] Boathouse, Fifth Annual CEO Study on Marketing and the CMO, 2026.
[8] ACAM / Kantar / IBM, Australian AI in Marketing Benchmark Report 2026.
[9] chiefmartec, 2025 Marketing Technology Landscape.