MBD113: Is Your Marketing Effective?

12 October 2025 | Issue #113

In this issue:

Is Your Marketing Effective?
Is Affinity Going the Subscription Route?
No, AI Isn't Making Engineers 10x More Productive
Book Cover Design Help
Is Design Dying?
Evolving Content Without Losing the Human Touch
I've been on a bunch of podcasts recently. Have you listened?
Design Quote of the Week

An archer takes aim — **Midjourney prompt:** an archer hits a bullseye. A vibrant, high-contrast illustration using flat vector-style shading with neon and duotone color blocking. The characters are stylized with exaggerated lighting in yellow and magenta tones, set against a cyan background. There’s a strong use of shadow and highlight to create depth without using gradients. It uses clean lines and a minimal background to keep focus on the figures and objects. --ar 16:9

Is Your Marketing Effective?

It's a simple question that never has a simple answer.

As more of the marketing space is taken up by AI, zero-click searches, and social media made to enrage, brand is becoming more necessary than ever.

But how do you measure the efficacy of brand?

This has been the question that pushed so many leaders to over rotate on performance marketing. With performance marketing, we can see that if you put a dollar into the machine, you'll get two dollars back.

But with brand, it's much harder to measure, so it's harder to quantify the results. How can you tell if your brand marketing is effective?

You have to look at the long-term growth of the business.

What do Marketing Leaders Think?

The Content Marketing Institute and MarketingProfs just released new research, and this year, they're taking a different approach.

Instead of just talking about trends in marketing and content marketing, this year's report looks at the results through the lens of effectiveness.

Over the past 12 months, here is how marketing leaders describe the effectiveness of their work:

12% say they're highly effective (exceeded goals).
47% say they're somewhat effective (met most goals).
31% say they're neutral (mixed results).
7% say they're somewhat ineffective (fell short of most goals).
3% say they're highly ineffective (failed to meet goals).

12% say they're highly effective (exceeded goals). 47% say they're somewhat effective (met most goals). 31% say they're neutral (mixed results). 7% say they're somewhat ineffective (fell short of most goals). 3% say they're highly ineffective (failed to meet goals).

Tools or People?

The report goes on to say that while people are important to making change, adding headcount isn't a high priority.

Rather than augment their teams, businesses are planning for teams to get better at their jobs. I wonder how much of this is due to the poor job market for white collar workers (I know this can be debated based on which news you watch, but I can tell you that it's not a great job market for some folks). Leaders can make better defined future plans knowing their people are unlikely to leave for a new opportunity.

Teams get better at their jobs with time. AI wasn't seen as a deciding factor, but it could show some gaps in capabilities.

The strategy behind marketing and content marketing was seen as a major driver for improvements. This isn't driven by a tool, but rather leaders having better understanding of what the audience, and the business needs. The technology was used to sharpen those strategies, but the human had to do the work in the first place.

As Robert Rose, author of the report says, "tools don't erase fundamentals." The basics of marketing are still needed, even with all of the "gains" that AI is supposedly creating.

While productivity continues to grow thanks to AI, the performance (efficiency) isn't growing with it.

So, What's Effective?

Brand marketing is going to be driven by people, not AI. In many ways, it's also the antidote to AI. Your job as a marketer is to convince the higher ups that they're not going to easily measure the efficacy of brand.

It's no different than design. Great marketing design doesn't necessarily lead to more sales. But it helps the audience take you more seriously.

You'd never buy a medical device if the box was drawn by a toddler. Spending extra to improve the design will help the customer take you seriously. Which means their odds of buying your product goes up. Which leads to more sales.

It's not a simple 1+1=2 equation. But with the right story, you can explain to leadership that 1+X=3.

NEWS AT THE INTERSECTION OF MARKETING, DESIGN, & AI

Is Affinity Going the Subscription Route?

On October 30, we will find out if Affinity (the one true challenger to the Adobe Creative Cloud) will continue with lifetime license options, or if new owner, Canva, will move users to a subscription model.

Reddit users chime in

In the meantime, if you want to get Affinity 2 apps on your iPad, they're currently free!

Download the apps from the Apple App Store
Activate the free trial
Then switch to paid ($0)
Free pro-level design software on your iPad!

I don't know if you'll be able to register the products anymore, but you'll be able to use the apps until they're no longer supported by an iOS update in the future.

No, AI isn't Making Engineers 10x More Productive

While AI is making a lot of things easier, Colton Voege has some thoughts on the real impact AI is having. I'm not sure I fully agree with him, but it's an interesting read.

H/T: Rolf Mistelbacher

Read now

The Future CMO

Recently my friend Joeri was showing off the AI-generated book cover for his new book, The Future CMO. I offered to make some minor edits to the cover to help with legibility and hierarchy.

Below you can see the before and after.

The Future CMO, before and after my edits — Now the subtitle isn't fighting for attention with the title. And everything is properly centered.

If you have an AI design that you need cleaned up, let me know how I can help. It doesn't take long.

Is Design Dying?

It's an inflammatory title, but it got me to listen to the latest episode of The Angry Designer Podcast.

Watch now

Transmutative AI: Evolving Content Without Losing the Human Touch

Lee Judge introduces the concept that AI is more than just repurposing. We're using AI to transform human-generated ideas into new executions, but reframed with intent.

Read now

RECENT AND UPCOMING ENGAGEMENTS

I was a guest on the Maine PR Council's lunch and learn. I'll talked about how to make effective AI visuals.

If you want to watch a recording, the details are in this post.

October 9th, I was on the Podpage live stream talking about Building a Great-Looking Brand

October 10th, I was a guest on Creator News Live

Also, I was on with Bill Schick, where I talk about Top 3 Branding Mistakes That Stop Product Growth.

(we can all agree that's too many photos of me in a small space)

DESIGN QUOTE OF THE WEEK

“Technology over technique produces emotionless design.” – Daniel Mall

My AI disclaimer: This week, I wrote the main article and the news items. If AI generates the images, I include the prompt so you can see how I got to that image.