Ebiquity's global CEO Ruben Schreurs says most marketers can't prove the ROI gap between short-term (1.87) and long-term investment (4.22) and AI tools are compounding the problem.
The channels marketers have been defunding for a decade are often outperforming the ones they've been building toward.
Ruben Schreurs, global CEO of marketing effectiveness consultancy Ebiquity, made one of the clearer calls you'll hear at any marketing conference this year: stop buying platforms and AI tools you can't justify.
He's not arguing against technology. He's arguing against the pattern where every new channel and tool gets funded before the existing ones are measured.
The ROI numbers make the case plainly. Ebiquity's 2024 global profitability study put short-term marketing ROI at 1.87. Total-term ROI, accounting for long-term brand effects, comes in at 4.22. That's not a small gap.
Total-term marketing ROI versus short-term ROI, per Ebiquity's 2024 global profitability study
Most marketing budgets are built around the 1.87 number, or something even shorter. The optimisation pressure runs toward the channels that show results in a dashboard within 30 days, regardless of what those results actually represent.
Schreurs' point isn't that AI tools are useless. It's that adopting them before you've measured what your current mix is doing adds cost without adding clarity. You're not building on a foundation. You're building on an assumption.
The platform proliferation problem runs deeper than tool count. Every new channel added to the mix increases complexity in measurement, budget allocation and reporting. That complexity compounds. Teams that are already stretched spend more time managing the stack than interrogating the results.
This is the uncomfortable part of what Schreurs is saying. The shift toward performance channels and away from brand investment hasn't been justified by the numbers. The ROI data has pointed in the other direction for years. But the platforms that benefit from short-term measurement make their case loudly, and the platforms that benefit from long-term brand investment don't have a self-serve dashboard to prove it.
The fix isn't to stop experimenting. It's to require the same measurement discipline for new tools that you'd apply to anything else. What problem does this solve? What's the counterfactual? How will you know if it worked?
If you can't answer those questions before you buy the tool, that's the answer.