The new standards of marketing execution
Attention is becoming scarce, expectations are becoming more personal, journeys are fragmented and growth is concentrated. These four forces are not independent: together they raise the level of sophistication that an organization must deliver in order to remain relevant.
Marketing performance no longer depends solely on the quality of a campaign. It depends on the ability to produce, personalize, coordinate and improve continuous experiences.
Four forces that redefine performance
Each force is presented by its mechanism, the published evidence that attests to it, and then the consequence that we draw from it.
- 01
Hypercompetition and attention
Supply, content and contact points are increasing faster than the available attention.
+66%
of SKU in three years in a studied manufacturer, while average sales per SKU decreased by 40%
Source: McKinsey, The value of getting personalization right · cases cited by McKinsey.
The Havas figure does not measure a creative weakness: it measures the pressure exerted by an offer that grows faster than the demand for attention. Presence no longer produces preference, and each speech must gain its relevance.
Exploring this force - 02
Personalization and customer experience
personalization improves performance, but greatly increases the complexity of execution.
71%
consumers expect personalized interactions; 76% say they are frustrated when they are not.
Source: McKinsey, The value of getting personalization right.
−50%
acquisition cost and +10 to 30% ROI marketing reported in the cases of personalization studied
Source: McKinsey, The value of getting personalization right · reported cases, high range.
The reasoning is arithmetic: more audiences × more intentions × more products × more contexts = more decisions, content and variants. McKinsey brings together these requirements in four dimensions — Data, Decisioning, Design, Distribution — that must work together. personalization becomes indispensable at the very moment when a manual execution model becomes unable to produce it economically on a large scale.
Exploring this force - 03
Omnichannel customer journey
The problem is not the number of channels, but the orchestration of the route through them.
10 +
channels used by B2B customers, compared to five in 2016
Source: McKinsey, B2B dirty: omnichannel everywhere · buyers B2B.
6
channels on average fully customized by the best performing marketing teams, over ten engagement channels used
Source: Salesforce, State of Marketing · marketers interviewed.
The sequential funnel no longer describes the actual behavior: streaming, navigation, search and purchase mix constantly, and not all contact points have the same influence value. The difficulty therefore moves from multichannel presence to coordination — more channels × more times × more behaviors × more data × more decisions.
Exploring this force - 04
Polarisation of performance
The necessary sophistication increases, but the capacities to absorb it are distributed very unevenly.
92% / 1%
companies plan to increase their AI investments, but only 1% actually consider themselves mature
75% / 18%
consumer goods players remain in exploration or pilot, 18% actually move to scale
Source: BCG and Consumer Goods Forum, How CPG and retail leaders maximize AI ROI · GICs studied.
5%
companies are classified as "future-build" by BCG, while 60% still derive little material value from AI
The gap is not about access to technology, which is widely available, but about the ability to transform it into an execution system. BCG places 70% of the value of an AI transformation in people and organization, compared with 10% in algorithms. Therefore, AI does not remove the capacity divide: it tends to favour organizations that are already able to absorb it.
Exploring this force
What changes for marketing leaders
Competitiveness no longer depends solely on the quality of a campaign; it depends on the organization's ability to continuously transform data, intentions and decisions into relevant experiences in a growing number of contexts.
The four forces converge towards the same point: the new problem is a problem of execution capacity.
Sources and methodology
The figures cited come from works published by third parties' firms, institutions and laboratories, and we take them back to the area of origin — the population interviewed, category, year, forecast or observed result — without broadening it. The analyses and convictions that accompany them are ours and are reported as such.
- Havas, Meaningful Brands 2025 — meaningful-brands.com
- McKinsey, The value of getting personalization right — www.mckinsey.com
- McKinsey, B2B dirty: omnichannel everywhere — www.mckinsey.com
- Salesforce, State of Marketing — www.salesforce.com
- McKinsey, Superagency in the workplace — www.mckinsey.com
- BCG and Consumer Goods Forum, How CPG and retail leaders maximize AI ROI — www.bcg.com
- BCG, Are you generating value from AI? The driving gap — www.bcg.com
- BCG, AI transformation is a labourforce transformation — www.bcg.com
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