Marketing’s ROI Obsession Needs a Science-Led Reset.
Public R&D Proves Lasting Impact Arrives Late but Transforms Markets.
Why Science Funding is the Sharper Mirror for Marketing
Advertising has been haunted for decades by the demand to prove “bang for the buck.” Dashboards, attribution models, and econometric curves all try to force complex effects into short-term linear returns. Science funding shows why this frame is flawed. As MIT Tech Review’s David Rotman writes, calculating ROI on research is “notoriously difficult” because the lag between investment and payoff often spans decades.
The atomic clocks built in Cold War labs did not deliver any immediate commercial gain. Yet without them, GPS would not exist, and without GPS, businesses from Uber to supply-chain tracking would not function. That long, circuitous chain is exactly what marketers ignore when they judge brand campaigns only by immediate conversions. The real multipliers are deferred and often disconnected from the original spend, until they are not.
Marketing as an Adaptive System, not a Straight Line
EY-Parthenon strategist Karen Crum describes brand spending as behaving “more like biology: an interconnected adaptive system.” In biology, many experiments fail, but the system persists until one mutation locks in as an evolutionary advantage. The same is true in branding. A dozen campaigns may underperform, but one breakthrough, a tagline that embeds itself culturally, a code that consumers adopt as shorthand, compounds into years of pricing power and resilience. The point is not efficiency in the short run; it is system-level endurance.
Advertising that looks wasteful in quarterly reports often proves decisive when viewed across decades. Like R&D, brand investment creates its own ecosystem of interdependent effects, where spillovers and compounding matter more than direct cause and effect.
Evidence from Economics: Why Delayed Impact Lasts Longer
New research cited by Rotman, from Texas A&M and the Federal Reserve Banks of Dallas, confirms the non-linear nature of return. By tracking private-sector R&D investment against total factor productivity, the productivity generated from new ideas and better strategy rather than more labor or equipment, the study found the real lift only appeared after five to ten years. Crucially, once the impact landed, it persisted. Public R&D funding accounted for 20–25% of private-sector productivity growth since World War II, shaping industries well beyond its intended scope.
The parallel with marketing is unavoidable. The value of brand equity shows up in pricing strength, category leadership, and recruitment appeal years after the campaign that seeded it has faded. Short-term ROI frameworks erase this picture entirely, just as judging science only by immediate patents would miss the eventual rise of GPS or CRISPR.
Spillovers as the Overlooked Currency of Brand
The final lesson from R&D is spillover. Investments in one domain often trigger outcomes in another. Atomic clocks were built for military precision; GPS unlocked consumer navigation and reshaped logistics globally. In marketing, a sponsorship meant to drive awareness can end up cementing employer branding, shifting regulator attitudes, or opening distribution channels.
These second-order effects are rarely quantified, yet they form the true backbone of brand value. WARC’s analyses echo this: broad, long-horizon brand spend has compounding effects well beyond sales uplift. Narrow ROI frameworks miss the wider dividend, the loyalty buffer in a crisis, the talent magnetism of cultural relevance, the optionality that comes when a brand is already coded as trusted.
Bottom line: Brands that Demand Instant ROI Miss the Very Impact They Are Paying For
Science funding proves value arrives late, spills sideways, and lasts longer. Marketing must learn the same rule or keep undervaluing its own work.
