A strong marketing investment review depends on five specific habits, not one good quarter. This matters because without incremental and marginal ROI, budget conversations default to last-click numbers that misrepresent what paid media contributed. Without fluid budgets and constant retesting, brands fund channels that stopped performing months ago while leaving money elsewhere. This video covers the five specific habits that make investment review conversations easier to win.
Why a Strong Marketing Investment Review Comes Down to Five Specific Habits
A strong marketing investment review comes down to five specific habits, not a single metric or a lucky quarter, and skipping any one of them tends to show up as a harder conversation with finance later. In this video, John Wallace, CEO of LiftLab, runs through the same five things he tells every brand preparing for a monthly or weekly investment review. It starts with genuinely wanting better dialogue between finance, agencies, and ad platforms, scrutinizing what each partner has actually delivered rather than funding them by default, and being fluent enough in incremental and marginal ROI to have that conversation in finance’s own terms.
The remaining habits build on that foundation: knowing exactly how paid media affects both growth and profitability, being willing to move budget fluidly out of underperforming channels and into ones still leaving money on the table, treating last month’s results as perishable rather than permanent through constant retesting, and finally, letting go of last-click revenue as the metric of record, since it was never built to represent how much of total sales paid media actually drives.
In this video, you’ll learn:
How to foster productive dialogues between finance and media partners
The importance of shifting from last-click metrics to more accurate ROI measurements
Strategies for implementing budget fluidity across various media channels
Why a continuous improvement mindset is vital for adapting to changing market conditions
How to effectively communicate paid media’s impact on business growth to leadership
TIME STAMPFull Video Transcript: The 5 Pillars of a Strong Marketing Investment Review Explained
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In this video, LiftLab CEO John Wallace runs through the five things he tells every brand to fix before their next investment review.
[0:00 – 0:13] Introduction
We thought it was time for the top five list. What are the top five things brands should do to better prepare for their investment review? Some investment reviews are monthly, I know some of you are doing them weekly, but it’s the same five things every time.
[0:13 – 1:00] 1. Have an Appetite for Better Dialogue
First off, top of the list, you have to have an appetite to have a better dialogue between finance, your agencies, and the ad platform partners, the Metas and Googles and TikToks of the world. You want to have a desire to scrutinize the media partners; it’s in your interest to know what have they done for you, and you’re going to fund them up to that level where they’re still performing for your brand, and that’s going to protect that budget. If they’re still performing, they’re going to get that budget; it’s going to be in both parties’ interests. The other is, when you’re talking to finance, you want to embrace better math. You need to be able to talk about incremental ROI as well as marginal ROI, and every finance person understands what’s the ROI from today’s spend levels. If I add budget in, we know that that performance is different.
[1:01 – 1:18] 2. Track How Paid Media Affects Growth and Profitability
You need to have a commitment to knowing how paid media affects both growth and profitability. Your finance team is going to thank you if you can say, “Here’s how much topline growth I can deliver,” and this is what it’s going to do in terms of profitability as I spend deeper into an ad platform.
[1:19 – 1:38] 3. Embrace Budget Fluidity
You need to embrace budget fluidity across your media channels. You need to be able to take away from a channel that’s not performing anymore the way that it was potentially in the prior period and move it over to a channel where you’re leaving money on the table, and you need to have an organization that embraces that fluidity.
[1:38 – 2:04] 4. Continuous Improvement Mindset
A continuous improvement mindset: knowing that what worked for you last month is not going to pay off this month. You need to be willing to retest, run new experiments, get new data points from your mix model, and know where to place the new bets. You need to know that what the model is seeing in terms of data can be augmented with a fresher experiment, and that’s the continuous improvement mindset we’ve seen brands really leverage.
[2:05 – 2:39] 5. Let Go of Last Click Revenue
It’s stating the obvious, but you need to be willing to let go of last click revenue. Continuing to second guess the profitability and the growth of a company by looking at a vanity metric like last click, and we know sometimes last click is at least correlated with total sales, but most teams in an investment review are being held to how much of total sales can be driven by paid media, and last click just doesn’t represent that number appropriately. So those are the five; we can add to this list in the comments, I’m really looking for your dialogue. Thank you.
Key Lessons: The 5 Pillars of a Strong Marketing Investment Review
Dialogue: Establish a strong communication bridge between finance, agencies, and ad platforms to scrutinize performance and protect budgets.
Analytics: Utilize incremental and marginal ROI metrics to provide finance teams with clear insights into profitability and scaling.
Flexibility: Adopt a fluid budget approach, reallocating resources from underperforming channels to those providing better returns.
Experimentation: Maintain a continuous improvement mindset by regularly running new tests to augment data models and refine strategies.
Attribution: Move away from vanity metrics like last-click revenue to better represent the true contribution of paid media to total sales.
