Stop answering "what's the ROI of that billboard?" the wrong way

Melanie van Rooy, who ran marketing at the Clicks Group for five years after a 40-year career, has the sharpest response I've heard. Her example is worth memorising for your next exco meeting: a customer sees the billboard, hears the radio ad on 94.7, gets a push notification, scrolls past a video, walks into a store and picks up a leaflet. Which one influenced the sale?

"Marketing is cumulative. It's a combined effect of many touchpoints that shapes a decision. So no, dear sir, I cannot tell you what the ROI of that specific billboard was."

The skill isn't refusing accountability — it's refusing false precision while staying accountable. And the way you do that is by translating everything before it leaves your department.

The translation layer

Before any number goes to the business, run it through three questions:

Whose language is this? Impressions, engagement and click-through are operational metrics — they're how we run campaigns, not how the business measures results. Translate them into sales, basket size, acquisition, retention, or cost saved. Bronwyn Pretorius, CMO of Ackermans, is blunt about it: "Engagement rates mean nothing to them. We're talking about sales, basket, customer acquisition."

What horizon is this? Label every result short-term (this quarter's leads), medium-term (pipeline and consideration) or long-term (brand equity and pricing power). Mixing horizons is how marketing loses credibility — you claim a brand win on a performance timeline and get caught.

What did we promise? Tie every report back to the commitment it answers. Results without a stated promise read as cherry-picking, even when they're real.

Then schedule the education

The billboard question never fully goes away, because the audience keeps changing. So the best leaders build the teaching into the calendar rather than leaving it to chance. Bronwyn presents what marketing has done — and what's coming — to the entire business every quarter, and to the leadership forum every month. Tracey-Lee Zürcher-Campbell at Payflex does it at the company town hall, always leading with the business case. Her line for it: internal PR is 50% of the job.

The payoff is practical. When marketing has spent months showing its commercial value, the rest of the business stops rolling its eyes at the next request and starts seeing the bigger picture. In an apparel business shooting a summer campaign in a rainy July with samples begged from the buying team, that goodwill is the job.

Melanie's conclusion, after decades of it: a senior marketing leader is also an educator. You're not only leading the function — you're defending it, translating it, and helping the business understand its strategic value. We drive cars every day and don't call ourselves mechanics. Marketing is the one discipline everyone assumes they could do. Your job is to answer the billboard question so well that, over time, they stop asking it.

Try this week: rewrite your last monthly report, replacing every marketing metric with its business translation — or an honest "this builds long-term equity" label. Then book a recurring slot at your company's town hall before Friday.

Marketers who do this well rarely worked it out alone. More on where that thinking gets pressure-tested in the guide to South African marketing communities.

Sourced from recorded, on-the-record interviews on the South African Digital Marketing Podcast. Every practitioner quoted above is named in the text.