The effectiveness of marketing has reached an all-time low, according to a survey of 3,000 global marketers conducted by The Fournaise Marketing Group as cited by the World Advertising Research Center.

The marketers surveyed said that 65% of their marketing spend had no discernible effect on consumers in 2007.

The report suggests the main cause of the waste can be largely attributed to lack of measurement.

Of the 55% of marketers who track their spending, 80% do so manually, spending hours gathering and analyzing data. Only one in 10 marketers surveyed had automated systems in place to track the effectiveness of their spend.

"Media clutter, sophisticated consumers and intense competition go some way to explain the wastage," says Fournaise CEO Jerome Fontaine. "But tracking every marketing dollar spent would mitigate the effect and feed critical real time analysis back into marketing strategies."