A recent study from Columbia University just confirmed what we’ve been hearing for years: Marketers have access to lots of different metrics, but just not the right ones.

When we talk to CMOs about performance metrics, they report that when they ask their team to present metrics to show their performance, they’re likely to get things like:

• From the print team: “Sales lift from feature is averaging about 11%.”
• From research: “Brand health is up 9% vs. last year.”
• From their media agency: “We’ve shifted toward breadth of consumers and gotten our reach up by 8%.”
• From their media director: “We delivered 380 TRPs of TV vs. 310 last year.”
• From their digital team: “Despite buying cheaper inventory, we’ve kept clickthrough at 2.9%.”
• From their creative agency: “Our new spots are showing a 15% increase in likability.”

I haven’t found a whole lot of CEOs who would accept any of those metrics as indicators of CMO performance, and with good reason.  This, I believe, is why average CMO tenure, though rising recently due to economic pressure, is still under 4 years.