Responsible Marketing: A Force for Good, and a Force for Growth

10 Graphs & Charts for 2024

Instead of creating yet another trends deck for 2024, or share my own predictions, I wanted to share 10 interesting charts and graphs I've come across in the past year that help demonstrate the Responsible Marketing opportunity for brands and advertisers, both from an ethical and business perspective, and the challenges that advertisers need to overcome in order to take full advantage.

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1) Responsible Marketing Compliance. Most (88%) companies have one, but only 47% have KPIs or targets set, and only 1 in 5 financially incentivise compliance.

Source: WFA (2023) Responsible Marketing Frameworks Survey Results

2) ESG is Better for Business. The S&P 500 ESG Index outperformed the broader S&P 500 by 1.95% in 2023. The S&P 500 ESG Index has outperformed the S&P 500 in all but one of the last seven years.

Source: S&P 500 ESG Tracker

3) 25% Carbon Emission Reduction 'Quick Win'. If the industry were to eliminate extremely high emissions inventory, every market’s average gCO2PM would drop by more than 25%. In larger markets like Germany, the US, and the UK, carbon emissions could be instantly halved.

Source: Scope 3 (2023), The State of Sustainable Advertising

4) Cheaper is not Better. The primary incentive driving programmatic media buying behavior is cost. Cheaper inventory is often poorer quality. Poor quality often leads to inventory that is not viewable, has fraud, and is not brand safe e.g CPMs on MFA websites are 25% lower than those on non-MFA websites.

Source: ANA (2023), Programmatic Media Supply Chain Transparency Study

5) The (High) Cost of Doing Nothing. Ad Verification firm DoubleVerify found that fraud rates are 5.1% higher on unmanaged campaigns — 367% worse than managed campaigns. On peak days, fraud rates for the unmanaged campaign spiked to nearly 25%, resulting in one out of every four impressions being wasted. Similar results were seen for viewability tracking.

Source: DoubleVerify (2023), Global Insights Report 2023

6) 52% of Media Budgets are Wasted Low Quality Creative i.e. ads that are statistically unlikely to deliver impact because they are unsuitable for the media they’re placed in. 35% of ads lacked the correct branding.12% of ads were the wrong size, i.e. the incorrect aspect ratio, and 50% of ads had no Call-to-Action. When CreativeX extrapolated this number from their $1.36B data set to broader industry spend, this was found to represent over $200B of wasted media spend.

Source: CreativeX (2023), Waste Not, Want Not: The Billion Dollar Opportunity Cost of Low Quality Creative

7) On-Screen Gender Imbalance. Male cast members dominate the complexion of advertising around the world. The visual and aural composition of males is higher than the male % population in every region. East & SE Asia is the only region where gender balance is on par with the male/female population split.

Source: Extreme Reach (2023), Gender Diversity in Advertising Creative

8) Advertising is Not Accessible to All. 4.1% of Europeans are either Blind or suffer from vision impairments that cannot be corrected by glasses. 2/3rds of those who are visually impaired are not able to understand information communicated through advertising.

Source: P&G & RNIB (2023), Key Insights for More Accessible Content

9) Advertisers want greater Agency Agility. 92% of respondents believe this is important but satisfaction is low at just 31%. 92% also want stronger integration of media. 86% of rate automation as an important area to unlock efficiencies, but satisfaction with current agency capabilities is low (a high 66% point gap).

Source: WFA & MediaSense (2023), Future of Media Agency Models

10) Agencies remain key partners - but their service models need to change. 68% of marketers predict no change in their involvement with agencies in the long term, but only 42% believe that their agencies will remain crucial. 26% believe that external agencies will have to shift their services to remain involved.

Source: IPA & ISBA (2023),Shift Happens: What the evolution of in-housing means for agencies

Liam Brennan

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