The question I ask before approving any marketing spend

Someone brought me a proposal recently for a speaking slot at an industry event. Ten thousand pounds. A good stage, a real audience, exactly the right people in the room.

I asked what the last one had returned. Nobody could tell me. Not because anyone was hiding it, but because nobody had decided beforehand what they were looking for, so afterwards there was nothing to look at.

That is the normal state of things. It is also the whole problem.

"It raises our profile" is not an answer

It might be true. Profile is a real thing and it does eventually turn into money. But as a reason to spend, it fails a basic test: there is no version of the future in which it turns out to have been wrong.

Any spend that cannot fail is a spend nobody has thought about. If the event goes badly, you raised your profile. If it goes brilliantly, you raised your profile. The sentence survives every outcome, which means it was never really a reason.

The question

Before I approve anything, I want an answer to this:

What would we have to see afterwards to know this worked, and when would we expect to see it?

It sounds like a finance question. It is not. It is a thinking question, and the useful part is watching what happens when you ask it.

Sometimes the answer arrives immediately and specifically, and you learn the person has genuinely thought it through. Sometimes it turns out the thing being bought is not what anyone actually wants. And sometimes there is a long silence, which is its own answer.

You are not asking for a forecast. You are asking whether a plan exists.

What it is not

This is where the question gets misused, so let me be clear about it.

It is not an argument for only spending money on things that produce a number by Friday. That thinking wrecks marketing, and it wrecks it in a specific way: everything with a fast, legible payback gets funded, everything slow gets cut, and two years later nobody can work out why nothing converts any more.

Trade shows are the example I keep meeting. Look at a show against digital on the same timescale and it always looks poor. Look at it eighteen months later and the picture is completely different, because those leads move slowly, buy larger, and often arrive already convinced. I have watched a stand that appeared to have failed quietly repay itself long after everyone stopped checking.

So the question is not "can you measure it". It is "what would you look at, and when". A perfectly good answer is: not much for a year, then these three things.

The failure is not slow payback. The failure is nobody agreeing in advance what payback would even look like, because then the spend gets judged by whoever happens to be in the room and whatever mood they are in.

What actually changes

Write the answer down. One line is enough. What we expect to see, and roughly when.

Two things follow. You stop having the same argument every year, because there is a record of what you agreed rather than a contest of memories. And you get permission to stop things, which is the harder and more valuable half. It is almost impossible to cancel an activity nobody ever defined success for, because you can never prove it failed.

Most marketing budgets are not badly spent. They are unexamined, which over a few years produces the same result and feels much more reasonable along the way.