Intermedia Global says a new survey of senior UK marketers has exposed persistent weaknesses in campaign execution, return on investment measurement, and marketing technology use, with half of respondents rating their organisation’s overall campaign execution below average.
Based on the company’s Marketing Experience readiness survey, the research found that 50% of senior marketers scored their business’s campaign execution at less than 11 out of 20. Only 6% said their teams were genuinely agile when defining, creating, and executing campaigns, a result that suggests many departments are still struggling to move quickly even after investing in tools and data.
The planning gap is also clear. One in eight respondents, or 13%, said they do not have a content strategy, while 56% said they either do not gather content and campaign performance insights at all, or they produce reports and then fail to act on the findings. In practice, that leaves many teams with activity but little operational learning.
Measurement remains another weak point. Just over a third of marketing departments, 38%, said they measure ROI on some campaigns but not all, while 25% said they have no visibility on ROI whatsoever. When budgets are under pressure and scrutiny is rising, that leaves a sizeable gap between campaign delivery and financial accountability.
Steve Kemish, CEO of IMG, said: “Many teams have invested in platforms and data, but still struggle to execute campaigns efficiently and at speed. This suggests that operational friction remains one of the biggest hidden barriers to marketing performance today.”
Technology maturity varied sharply across the organisations surveyed. While 44% said their key martech tools, including CRM, automation, analytics, and DAM, work well together and described their current setup as “pretty good”, a quarter said those tools in their organisation are ineffective and are not fit for the future. The widest spread in scores across the survey appeared in technology maturity, underlining how unevenly capability is distributed from one team to the next.
Skills and adoption continue to drag on performance as well. Half of marketing teams said they offer only minimal onboarding and training for marketing technology when people join, or leave new users to figure it out for themselves, while 56% said teams understand the main features of the martech stack but underuse the advanced ones.
Steve Kemish added: “The findings found that technology itself isn’t necessarily the problem, it’s consistency. Some businesses are moving well along their martech journeys while others are still stuck in the Stone Age. It adds to the friction that prevents their campaigns from being effective.
“Overall, the research reinforces that modern marketing success is no longer just about creativity or investment in technology. It’s about operational maturity — how effectively organisations connect their data, systems, processes, people and execution to create a stronger Marketing Experience.”
The results point to a more basic operational question than many teams may expect: not whether the stack exists, but whether the organisation can use it coherently. The MX readiness assessment is available here.
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