When the Dashboard Says Yes and the Verdict Says No
By Fiona van Iersel
Minerva Empowerment
Marketing Communications
13 April 2026

Imagine a campaign whose reach, awareness, brand-image and sales measures all exceed their targets, yet the final verdict is “unsuccessful”. Before changing the media plan, I would want to know what that verdict actually means. Is there another objective, a profitability constraint or a measurement rule that the headline dashboard is not showing?

Different tools can play very different roles. Mobile advertising might contribute most directly to sales, while strong creative work amplifies reach and awareness without producing the same effect on its own. That raises a useful question: does the creative need a different media context or a clearer route to action? The hierarchy-of-effects model is relevant because awareness is only one stage in the process, rather than the end result (Lavidge & Steiner, 1961).

The combination matters more than any single tool in isolation. Integrated marketing communications coordinates channels so they perform different jobs across the customer journey, instead of expecting one channel to do everything (Kitchen & Burgmann, 2015; Batra & Keller, 2016). A channel that contributes little to immediate sales may still be helping the rest of the plan work.

But integration cannot rescue an unclear definition of success. Targets, constraints and the final judgement need to be intelligible together. If they contradict each other, perhaps the first conversation should be with whoever designed the dashboard.

References

Batra, R., & Keller, K. L. (2016). Integrating marketing communications: New findings, new lessons, and new ideas. Journal of Marketing, 80(6), 122–145.

Kitchen, P. J., & Burgmann, I. (2015). Integrated marketing communication: Making it work at a strategic level. Journal of Business Strategy, 36(4), 34–39.

Lavidge, R. J., & Steiner, G. A. (1961). A model for predictive measurements of advertising effectiveness. Journal of Marketing, 25(6), 59–62.