By Tom Hutchison: Industry Strategist at Acxiom

Tom Hutchison, Industry Strategist at Acxiom

I’ve never quite gotten the hang of breakfast. Coffee is easy. And toast – it’s hard to mess up toast. It’s the eggs that throw me off. I try to make them over easy. I start with flawless plans, detailed and precise. I use clarified butter, not oil. The temperature, medium low, is perfect for solidifying the whites and warming the yolks without cooking them.

My skillet distributes heat evenly and the spatula I use is thin and flexible. And yet, most of the time, they come out looking… odd. The yolks sit at the edge of the whites instead of neatly in the middle. They’re misshapen or lopsided. Most of the time the yolks break. And I’m forced to settle for having them scrambled. My plans for breakfast don’t work the way I thought they would. The same is true for many marketing strategies. 

It’s not uncommon for advertisers to be frustrated by their marketing performance. Agencies lay out exquisite strategies featuring communication methods and creatives designed to reach valuable customers with relevant offers. They create journeys for prospects that guide them to the decision to join the brand. Agencies develop engagement blueprints that anticipate when the customers grow complacent and need a reminder about why they love the brand. With all the effort put into the development of a strategy, why are so many brands exasperated by their marketing?

There’s an awkward truth that remains unspoken by many agencies today. A divide exists between strategy and execution. Media planners and campaign managers work with data that’s different from the information used by creative planners. Subtle variations in attributes and identities result in a loss of fidelity for the strategic plans. Evidence of the resulting inefficiencies manifest in many ways, but some of the more common indicators include the following.

Media planners can’t replicate personas as audiences.

Strategists often employ a unique insight or an exotic data element to create differentiated personas. If those attributes aren’t available to the media planners, then the audiences they create won’t behave in the predicted way. Designed for a slightly different group of people, the content lacks impact and the ads don’t perform as well as expected.


Campaign managers can’t identify customer journey milestones in real time channels. 

Strategies lay out a path of interactions designed to move audiences toward a purchase decision. Planners often configure the customer journey to trigger a communication tactic in response to specified behaviors. But the desired conditions aren’t always observable. The engagement platform may not capture data needed to identify that step in the journey, so the strategy can’t bring about an optimal experience. 

Creative strategies don’t account for opportune shifts in behavior.

Change. Happens. Always. The performance of any strategy erodes over time and creative planners may not detect the changes that diminish marketing performance. They’ve created a campaign at a certain point, but the media planners see the evolution of the audience as it unfolds. Unwavering execution of the strategy misses opportunities for course corrections that could yield more favorable outcomes. 

There’s nothing that’s going to make me better at cooking breakfast. The best utensils and methods and ingredients won’t improve my chances of getting my eggs to come out right. However, your advertising strategies don’t have to suffer a similar fate. Using data from a common supply chain for planning and execution ensures that your audiences respond to your messages. The data empowers you to react to consumers who reach out to you and to connect with them in a way that’s consistent with your plans. Giving creative planners access to living data sources will help them identify changes in the audiences and give them the opportunity to modify the strategy on the fly. Flawless execution requires effective data practices. You don’t have to settle for scrambled egg equivalent of marketing performance.