South Africa, Oct. 15 -- Marketing should be part of that conversation. In many businesses, it is not.

Instead, marketing often arrives at the executive table with dashboards, campaign summaries, reach numbers, engagement rates, cost-per-lead trends and platform-reported return on ad spend. Some of these metrics are useful. Some are necessary. But too often they still fail to answer the question that matters most:

Is your marketing budget creating growth, or just producing reports?

That is the marketing accountability gap.

It is not that marketing lacks value. Marketing can be one of the most powerful growth levers in a business. The issue is that too much of the marketing industry still explains performance in terms of activity metri...