By Steven Gerber and Ed See
Marketing has an image problem. Ironic for a discipline built on persuasion, but it’s losing its edge: consumers tune out, CFOs redirect dollars, and CMOs churn faster than New York Jets head coaches. The usual diagnoses—waning attention, fragmented channels, aging tech stacks—don’t tell the whole story.
Generative AI was billed as a savior, but so far, it has delivered more pilots than profits. Ninety-five percent of enterprise GenAI pilots show no measurable P&L impact, according to MIT research. No wonder trust in the boardroom is fraying.
This isn’t just an innovation story—it’s an outcomes story. The game changed faster than the scoreboard. We measure reach, not results; segments, not strategy; volume, not value. CMOs see the world one way, CEOs another: 70% of CEOs judge marketing on revenue growth and margin, according to McKinsey, but only 35% of CMOs track those as top metrics.
But history shows there’s a way out of this downward spiral.
Two decades ago, Net Promoter Score (NPS) broke a similar stalemate in customer experience by providing a simple score and an actionable playbook that set a standard, aligned teams, and unlocked compounding improvement. Marketing needs its own analogue metric. We call it the True Value of Marketing (TVM).
TVM and How It Works
TVM is both the benchmark and the blueprint, an actionable index and the operating system that proves and expands marketing’s impact. At its core, TVM treats every marketing program as an investment, then classifies each program as either value-adding, value-neutral, or value-contracting. The results help organizations direct their resources accordingly.
Defining the Components of TVM
Like NPS, TVM is simple on the surface, transformative underneath. Here’s the TVM equation (bounded between –100 and +100):
Profitable Customer Value (PCV) refers to how much profit your customers generate due to marketing. This is the measurable business value you create by acquiring, retaining, or expanding customers. It includes short-term sales and the lifetime value (LTV) of those customers before direct marketing investment.
Opportunity Value (OV) is the growth you unlock by acting on visible opportunities, such as reducing churn, driving upsell and cross-sell, or finding pockets of profitable customer acquisition, rather than betting on opportunities with unknown expected value. This highlights the power of saying “no.”
Complexity Cost (CC) is the friction that slows everything down: too many platforms, duplicate vendors, slow approvals, and siloed data. Think of it as the invisible tax that inhibits growth.
How to Apply the Formula…
Value up, score up; complexity up, score down. If it rises, fund it. If it stalls, fix it. If it sinks, stop it. It’s one index, consistent across brands, regions, and reporting periods. It underscores the fundamental value of TVM: one truth beats a thousand dashboards.
…And How to Run It
1. Set the baseline:
• Use contribution margin as the common currency.
• Define the LTV horizon.
• Codify OV with confidence bands.
2. Identify the levers:
• PCV: show true lift with causal attribution.
• OV: use predictive value models to project future impact.
• CC: apply AI analytics to put a price on complexity, so retiring tools, consolidating vendors, and automating processes move the score.
3. Adopt the cadence