The ROI Rebellion: Why Advertising’s Favourite Metric Is a False God

In the kingdom of marketing metrics, ROI is king. Or rather, it’s a doddering old monarch being wheeled out for ceremonial appearances while the real work is done by far more nuanced operators. Welcome to the ROI Rebellion, where a growing number of marketers, strategists and exasperated planners are politely suggesting that maybe, just maybe, our industry's holy grail is actually a red herring.

Let’s be clear: ROI sounds like common sense. “What am I getting back for what I put in?” It’s the kind of question your CFO loves because it translates marketing into something that looks like physics, inputs, outputs, a nice tidy percentage. Trouble is, marketing isn’t physics. It’s more like alchemy. And ROI? Well, it's been exposed as a particularly blunt instrument in a business that desperately needs a scalpel.

Short-termism in a long-game business

First, let’s invoke the patron saints of marketing effectiveness: Peter Field and Les Binet. Their work, most notably in The Long and the Short of It, shows that campaigns optimised for short-term ROI often lead to lower long-term profitability. The data is brutal. Short-termism, usually powered by performance marketing that looks amazing in a spreadsheet, tends to cannibalise long-term brand growth. Field and Binet’s 60/40 rule (60% brand, 40% activation) isn’t just a nice heuristic. It’s a lifeline for marketers drowning in quarterly reporting cycles.

But still, marketers keep swinging for the short-term win, hyped up on digital’s promise of instant gratification and A/B tests that whisper sweet nothings into your KPI dashboards. Why? Because ROI is calculated per campaign, not over time. That means a cheap, tactical activation with a spike in clicks can have an eye-popping ROI, even if it does bugger-all for brand equity.

System1 and the tyranny of the rational

Enter System1, which has made a career out of arguing that the way we measure advertising is wildly misaligned with how people actually feel about it. Using emotional response as a predictor of long-term effectiveness, System1’s data consistently shows that the ads which make people feel, really feel, tend to be the ones that build brands and deliver profit over years, not weeks.

Yet ROI doesn’t reward emotion. It rewards efficiency. It’s why bland-but-clickable PPC ads get hailed as “top performers” while emotionally resonant brand campaigns have to fight tooth and nail for airtime in budget meetings.

Mark Ritson and Paul Dyson: The rebellion’s generals

Mark Ritson, never one to pass up an opportunity to skewer the industry’s sacred cows, has called out ROI worship for what it is: a dangerously simplistic metric being used to justify underinvestment in brand building. Paul Dyson, meanwhile, points out the obvious (but apparently still controversial) truth that ROI is not a measure of effectiveness. It's a measure of efficiency. And the most efficient campaigns? Often the ones with the least scale, reach, and impact.

It's like giving a standing ovation to someone for running the cheapest wedding of the year. Yes, you saved money. But was anyone moved to tears? Did anyone even remember it happened?

The rebellion isn’t anti-accountability. It’s pro-reality.

None of this is to suggest marketers should get a free pass to throw money at moodboards and hope for the best. But in our rush to justify every penny with precision, we’ve ended up optimising for the wrong outcome. We’ve mistaken what’s easy to measure for what matters.

The ROI Rebellion isn’t a rejection of measurement. It’s a call for better measurement. For metrics that recognise long-term brand health, mental availability, emotional connection, and yes, the occasional irrational human behaviour. It’s about replacing the glorified click-through rate with a more grown-up view of how brands actually grow.

So here’s a modest proposal: let’s stop asking “What’s the ROI?” like it’s the final word. Let’s start asking: What will this campaign mean in a year? In five? Will anyone remember it? Will it build memory structures, mental availability, and dare we say it, love?

Because in the end, the most profitable campaigns might not be the ones that show up on the Q4 dashboard. They’re the ones that live rent-free in culture. And that ROI doesn’t show up until much later. But when it does, it’s the kind of return you really want.