Key takeaways from Sweden’s EFFDay:
why marketing effectiveness needs to move closer to business value, demand creation and better decisions. The boardroom does not care about your campaign. It cares about growth.
For anyone who missed Sweden’s EFFDay, or wants a reminder of what was said, here is the short version: it was a day about marketing effectiveness that kept coming back to business.
Around 350 people from the Swedish marketing and communications industry gathered in one room. There were voices from the client side, the agency world, media platforms, industry experts and effectiveness specialists. The mood was energetic and practical. Less “what is the next shiny thing?” and more “what actually creates value, and how do we prove it?”
That frame was set early by Ian Whittaker, who brought an international boardroom and investor perspective to the stage. His message was clear: brand and marketing should be treated as investments, not cost lines.
Later in the day, Niklas Bondesson, NoA Consulting, Mats Rönne and Mats Georgson, strategy consultant, brought the conversation back to the same place from another angle: marketing creates value when it helps the business understand customers, unlock demand and make better decisions.
As partner to EFFDay, Nepa joined the conversation from two perspectives. Christel Andersson introduced advertising equity, a way of understanding the value advertising builds over time when it earns attention and makes people more willing to listen next time. Later, Andreas Nordfors joined Robert Löfstrand, Head of Client Solutions, Nordics at TikTok, to show how Creative AI, through our work with Wolt, can help identify which creative elements actually drive performance at scale.
Across the day, five patterns stood out.
1. Brand is not a cost line
Ian Whittaker opened with the issue many marketers face every budget season. Brand is often one of the biggest assets a company owns, but because marketing spend appears as a cost in the profit and loss statement, it becomes one of the easiest lines to cut when pressure rises.
That creates a dangerous mismatch. Boards and investors often understand that brand matters, but short term incentives still make cutting marketing feel attractive. Whittaker’s advice was not to walk into the CFO’s office asking for more budget. It was to talk about the risk of underinvesting.
One phrase captured the point especially well. Whittaker described brand spend as “intangible capex”, an investment that creates long term value rather than a discretionary cost to be trimmed.
His argument was not abstract. Strong brands help companies protect pricing power, build resilience and defend against new competitors. In other words, brand is not only about preference. It is also about risk, margin and future growth.
2. Most buying decisions start before the buying moment
If Whittaker explained why brand should be treated as an investment, Elias Betinakis from WPP Media and Lovisa Smedberg from Choreograph/WPP Media helped explain where that investment needs to work.
Their session focused on how people actually make decisions. Based on a large study of 1.2 million purchase journeys, they showed that people often enter the active buying phase with a bias already in place. The list of brands people actively consider is also short, around 2.6 brands.
That makes priming critical. If your brand is not already mentally available when the buying moment begins, you are fighting for attention too late. As Betinakis put it, if you are number three, you may already have a serious problem.
Lovisa Smedberg added a useful warning about relevance. Personalisation and data are powerful, but when brands focus too narrowly on the lower funnel, communication can become a grey mass. She used the example of yet another car driving through a pine forest: polished, probably relevant on paper, but almost impossible for people to distinguish from the next brand.
Her point was simple: data should help brands understand people better, not just target them harder.
3. Your campaign is not hated. Worse. It is ignored.
Once the business frame was set, the creative question became sharper. If marketing is an investment, forgettable advertising is not just a creative disappointment. It is wasted capital.
Nora Wingstrand from NoA described one of the biggest creative risks as the “boring tax”: the price brands pay when their advertising is so neutral that people simply move on. In her words, trying to bore someone into buying something may be the most expensive thing a marketer can do.
She also pointed out that neutral campaigns need significantly higher media investment to achieve the same effect as campaigns that trigger an emotional response. The logic is easy to understand. People who feel more remember more. And as Wingstrand put it, customers who feel more, buy more.
4. Consistency only works when it keeps moving
Another major theme was the value of long term creative platforms. But the point was not to repeat the same thing forever. The point was to build memory over time while continuing to evolve.
Christel Andersson from Nepa framed this through advertising equity: the value advertising builds over time in consumers’ minds. It is not about one campaign doing well in isolation. It is about what all communication efforts build together over time.
Together with Lantmännen and NORD, the session showed what this looks like in practice. Mark Robinson from Lantmännen described how the brand has worked deliberately, long term and consistently with high quality advertising that is worth people’s attention. He also showed how strong advertising equity can act as a lever for media investment, making campaigns more effective without necessarily increasing spend.
Petter Dixelius from NORD captured the creative challenge well: hold on, hold out, but do not forget to develop.
That line summed up one of the most useful distinctions of the day. Consistency is not repetition. It is recognisable development.
ICA’s Fredrik Kullberg made the same point through one of Sweden’s most iconic advertising platforms. He described continuity as part of ICA’s success, but also as something that demands constant renewal, courage and relevance.
The takeaway was clear. The audience has not necessarily moved on just because the marketing team has.
5. AI should make marketing smarter, not louder
AI was everywhere at EFFDay. But the most interesting conversations were not about replacing people or producing more content faster. They were about using AI to see patterns that humans might miss, and turning those patterns into better decisions.
Roshanak Fatahian and Albert Sten from Forsman & Bodenfors talked about AI as a different kind of perception. Machines can see patterns in ways humans do not, but people are still needed to interpret those patterns, challenge them and place them in a relevant cultural context.
Their argument was not AI versus humans. It was about productive friction: different people challenging each other, people challenging AI, and AI challenging how people think. That friction, they argued, is where some of the most interesting future ideas may emerge.
The TikTok and Nepa session made the AI discussion practical. Andreas Nordfors from Nepa and Robert Löfstrand, Head of Client Solutions, Nordics at TikTok, showed how creative analysis can reveal which elements actually drive performance. In the Wolt case, Creative AI analytics was used to decode a large number of TikTok ads and understand what was linked to acquisition cost. Product usage and faces were among the stronger drivers of conversion on TikTok.
The result was not just an interesting analysis. It became a practical playbook. The Wolt case showed a potential CPA reduction of around 40% when best practice creative guidelines were followed. You can read more about the Wolt case here: https://nepa.com/case/how-creative-ai-analytics-helped-wolt-unlock-a-potential-40-cpa-reduction-on-tiktok/
6. Marketing does not have a data problem. It has a decision problem.
A recurring pattern throughout the day was that marketing has become more complex, but not always more effective. There are more channels, more specialists, more systems, more data and more stakeholders involved than ever before.
Kapero’s Kaj Johansson and Poya Tavakolian described how marketing departments have become crowded with overlapping specialists, systems and responsibilities. The result is often fragmentation, even when everyone is trying to improve effectiveness.
They also pointed out that many teams now have more data than ever, but still struggle to create structure and extract real value from it. AI may save time, but in many organisations the saved time is simply used to produce more.
One of the clearest lines of the day came from the Kapero session: “We think we are limited by execution, but we are limited by decisions.”
That line connects directly back to the business frame. If marketing wants to be taken seriously as an investment, it cannot only produce faster. It has to decide better.
7. Marketing needs to unlock demand
The final sessions brought the day back to where it started: business growth.
Niklas Bondesson and Mats Rönne brought the discussion back to four key questions: where are we going, why are we not already there, what choices do we need to make and how do we execute consistently?
They also made the point that strong marketers need to understand what the CEO, CFO and wider leadership team care about. Another important point was that marketing’s strongest contribution to the organisation should be customer understanding.
Mats Georgson, took the argument further, urging marketers to stop seeing themselves as owners of campaigns and start seeing themselves as the people who can understand and unlock future demand.
That is a much heavier mandate than managing communication. It means understanding why people buy, why they do not, when the brand becomes relevant, where future demand might come from and how the business can act on it.
The Nepa perspective:
Connect the human and the commercial
At Nepa, many of these themes are already central to how we work with clients.
We believe marketing effectiveness starts with connecting the human and the commercial. What people notice. What they feel. What they remember. What they associate with the brand. What makes them consider, choose, pay more, come back or recommend. These are not soft questions. They are the mechanics of growth.
That is why we help clients connect brand tracking, campaign evaluation and Marketing Mix Modelling into one joined up view.
Brand tracking shows where the brand stands and how it moves over time. Campaign evaluation explains what communication does in people’s minds. MMM connects marketing investments to business outcomes.
When these perspectives work together, marketing moves from reporting to steering. It becomes easier to see what builds the brand, what drives action, what creates waste and what deserves more investment.
It also changes the role of AI. AI should not simply help brands produce more. It should help them learn faster. Creative AI can identify patterns across large volumes of creative assets. Campaign measurement can show what those assets actually do. Benchmarks can show whether performance is good enough. Human judgement can then turn the learning into better strategy, stronger briefs and sharper creative decisions.
The goal is not more data. The goal is better decisions.
Our advice to CMOs: three things to do now
1. Reframe brand spend as business protection
Do not start the budget conversation with “we need more money”. Start with what the brand protects and enables: pricing power, resilience, future demand, lower risk, stronger conversion and more efficient media over time.
Bring the CFO a business case, not a campaign case. Show what happens when the brand is strong, and what the business risks when investment is cut too early.
2. Measure whether your campaigns build memory before you scale them
Before putting more media behind a campaign, check if it is doing the basic jobs. Is it noticed? Is it connected to the right brand? Does it create any emotional response? Does it strengthen the associations you want to build?
If the answer is no, more reach will not fix the problem. It will only make the waste bigger.
3. Turn every campaign into a learning loop
Do not let campaign evaluation become a post rationalisation exercise. Use it to improve the next brief, the next creative route, the next media decision and the next budget discussion.
Look across campaigns, not only at one campaign at a time. Identify which assets drive sender recall, which emotions drive liking, which messages move consideration and which creative features improve performance. Then make those learnings part of the system.
Final thought
EFFDay was a useful reminder that marketing effectiveness is not only about better campaigns. It is about better business outcomes.
The strongest ideas from the day were not complicated. Treat brand as an investment. Build memory before the buying moment. Make people feel something. Stay consistent long enough for the work to work. Use AI to learn faster, not just produce more. And turn measurement into decisions.
Because the boardroom does not need more marketing activity. It needs more confidence that marketing is building demand, reducing risk and helping the business grow.
Published on: 4TH SEP 2026