Old Joke at risk

There is an old joke marketing people are very fond of and that goes as follows: "Us marketing guys know that 50% of our marketing investment is useless, however we cannot determine what 50% is it"

This is the best excuse ever to keep the marketing budget inflated. Any marketing investment, or action must be taken within a global comprehensive strategy (same aplies for all the other business aspects) and the final part of any action is to try to quantify the results, get the feedback and see if the time and money was worth it. Of course a radio advertisement or a TV commercial will have an impact on our sales although sometimes external factors such as general recession, new competitors, product improvement and so on can get us confused when comparing results versus same period last year.

For marketing freaks, marketing is good in itself, the brand building, the good will, the image, prestige and so on and yet their old joke pointed before could be somehow true until recently. If you use tools such as google analytics and see the impact through visits, time spent in your webpage, average number of pages visited then this joke becomes really old...unlike the need for more money marketinians (does the word even exist?) will always have