Mark Ritson just gave the Australian marketing industry a failing report card. Only a third of working marketers passed a basic exam, and most of them didn't know it. Here is why the answer isn't another AI tool, and what I would do instead.
A tool does not know your business. It gives you a faster way to be confident about the wrong answer.
Mark Ritson stood up at Mumbrella360 last week and handed the Australian marketing industry a report card. Only 35% of working marketers cleared a basic marketing exam. Sub-undergraduate questions. Ten of them. Four options each, one definitive answer. A nineteen-year-old marketing student would walk it. Two-thirds of the people doing this for a living could not.
Then the part that should worry you more. Three-quarters of the people who failed rated themselves above average. That is not a knowledge gap. That is a knowledge gap nobody can see, which is the most expensive kind.
I have been on both sides of this. I have sat in the client chair signing off budgets and I have sat on the agency side spending them. Here is what I think the exam result actually tells us. The Australian marketing industry does not have a tools problem. It has a numbers problem. Almost everything the industry is buying right now makes that problem worse, not better.
The numbers most marketers can't read are their own
Ritson's data found 60% of Australian marketers cannot define a quantitative research method. Three in ten cannot explain segmentation, targeting and positioning. Those are not exotic concepts. They are the floor.
Now line that up against where the money is going. Gartner has CMOs putting 15.3% of their marketing budget into AI this year, while more than half of them say they do not have the budget to execute their actual strategy. Read that twice. We are short on the money to do the basic job, and we are spending a growing slice of what we have got on tools to do a job most of us cannot define.
This is the bit that gets me. You cannot buy your way out of not knowing your own numbers. A tool does not know your business. It does not know what a good customer is worth to you, or which channel is quietly bleeding out, or whether the lift you saw last month was the campaign or the season. You know those things or you do not. No AI fills that in for you. It just gives you a faster way to be confident about the wrong answer.
Marketing was never a thinking thing. We made it a buying thing.
There is a reason the skills slid. For twenty years marketing turned into doing instead of thinking. Run the campaign. Post the content. Stand up the channel. The job became activity, and activity is easy to measure and easy to look busy at. The thinking part, the part Ritson is testing, got quietly optional.
AI has poured petrol on that. Now the doing is even faster and even cheaper, so the temptation is to do more of it. More channels, more content, more tools, all of it humming away while nobody can answer the only question that matters. Is any of this making volume, making margin or keeping the regulators happy? If it is not doing one of those three things, why are we doing it?
The spending is not even controlled. Uber's own people blew the company's entire annual AI coding budget in four months, and the COO admitted the heavier usage was not turning into proportionally more useful work. Only 30% of organisations say they have the infrastructure and maturity to scale what they are buying. So even the teams spending the most are telling you they are not ready to use it.
The share of working marketers who passed a basic, sub-undergraduate marketing exam set by Mark Ritson and Ipsos. Two-thirds would fail it.
You can see the same pattern in the retail media numbers this week. Brands are lifting spend into retail media networks while openly telling researchers they do not trust the measurement and are not convinced it works. That is not a strategy. That is a hope with an invoice attached. People are spending into a channel because everyone else is, not because they have looked at their own data and decided it earns its place.
What the benchmark data actually shows
We have scored marketing across hundreds of Australian businesses, and the same dimension comes last almost every time. Not creative. Not paid media. Data and tracking. The thing that tells you whether any of the rest of it is working is the thing most businesses have the least of.
That is the whole problem in one line. The weakest part of the average Australian marketing operation is the measurement layer. So when a new tool or a new channel turns up, there is no honest baseline to judge it against. You cannot tell if it worked because you could not see clearly before you started. So you trust the platform's own report, and the platform is grading its own homework.
The businesses that pull ahead are not the ones with the most tools. They are the ones who fixed the measurement first, then bought tools to act on what they could finally see. Order matters. You learn to walk before you run, and you scrape yourself once or twice on the way.
What I would do about it
Start with two questions. Do you know how much money you make? Do you know how much money you spend? You can work back from there. Everything else in marketing derives from those two numbers, and you would be surprised how many teams cannot answer them cleanly.
Then fix the measurement before you buy anything else. Get your analytics honest. Know your conversion rate, your channel mix and your real cost to acquire a customer against what that customer is worth. This is not glamorous and it does not come with a launch video. It is also the only thing that makes every later decision cheaper and smarter. I have seen businesses fix nothing but their mobile site and pick up 20% of revenue overnight, because the mobile experience was that bad and the data had been sitting there the whole time telling them.
Treat AI spend like any other line. If you took it out tomorrow and nothing changed, you have your answer. The test for a tool is the same as the test for a channel. Does it make volume, make margin or keep the regulators happy. If you cannot tie it to one of those, it is decoration.
Then invest in the thing the exam exposed. Education. Not a certificate on a wall. The basic literacy to read your own numbers and argue your own case. A marketer who can sit across from the CFO and explain the maths is worth more than a marketer with a stack of tools and no idea which ones are paying off. We are both paddling the same way. We both want to win. You cannot have that conversation if you cannot read the scoreboard.
The gap is the opportunity
Here is the upside, because there is one. If two-thirds of the industry cannot pass a basic exam, then the fundamentals are now a competitive advantage. Knowing your numbers is rare. Being honest about what is working is rare. Most people do not measure it and most people do not seek it out.
So the move in 2026 is almost boring. Slow down on the tools. Speed up on the thinking. Fix the measurement, learn the basics, and judge every shiny new thing against your own data instead of the room's enthusiasm. Do that enough times and you win, while everyone around you keeps buying answers to questions they have not learned to ask.