Author Talks: Cracking the code on content ROI

Thought leadership is hot—and with the advent of AI, it’s likely to get even hotter. But it’s also an investment, and historically, most leaders have lacked a codified approach to determining what it’s worth. In this edition of Author Talks, McKinsey Global Publishing’s Lucia Rahilly chats with Anthony Marshall, senior research director of thought leadership at the IBM Institute for Business Value, and Cindy Anderson, the institute’s chief marketing officer and global lead for engagement and eminence, about The ROI of Thought Leadership: Calculating the Value That Sets Organizations Apart (Wiley, Winter 2025). The coauthors reveal new research on why and how executive audiences consume this kind of research-driven content, how it informs their spending decisions, and how to quantify the impact of your own thought leadership program—as well as how to improve ROI in an increasingly flooded content marketplace. An edited version of the conversation follows. You can also watch the full video at the end of this page.

Why this book, and why now?

Anthony Marshall: Thought leadership has become more and more important over the past 20 years. In the last few years, Cindy and I have noticed a spike, not just among organizations directly associated with thought leadership, such as the big consultancies, but other organizations in other industries as well.

There seems to be a desire to embrace thought leadership as a key differentiator in terms of having conversations with clients that are attracting new business. As part of the process of justifying our thought leadership capability at IBM, Cindy and I conducted a lot of analysis to build a compelling and substantive value proposition. Ultimately, we recognized the importance of bringing that analysis to the broader public, to help others in what they do. 

Do executives actually make time for thought leadership?

Anthony Marshall: The series of surveys that we conducted to support the book was completed over three years. That allowed us to track longitudinally what was happening with thought leadership consumption. We learned that 88 percent of executives consume thought leadership. When we began researching in the middle of the COVID-19 pandemic, a typical executive spent two hours a week consuming thought leadership in one form or another: long form, short form, or video. That actually increased to three hours per week by the end of our survey. Overall, the amount of time that executives spend consuming thought leadership is increasing.

Executives are getting tangible value from thought leadership consumption. Roughly 80-plus percent of executives make business decisions as a consequence of consuming thought leadership. And 87 percent actually make spending decisions as a result of consuming thought leadership.

Chief executives are busier than ever. Why are they reading or watching more?

Cindy Anderson: Based on the survey responses, there are five ways that executives find value in thought leadership consumption:

1. It drives revenue growth and profitability: 46 percent of global C-suite executives said that thought leadership helped drive greater revenue growth in their organization.
2. It gives executives a competitive advantage. Almost all (96 percent) of respondents said that having that kind of data and analysis helps them make better business decisions.
3. It improves innovation and business agility.
4. Their employees are more satisfied.
5. They have fewer knowledge gaps. Thought leadership helps them compensate for inadequate data and analysis within their own organizations.

Anthony Marshall: Executives who consume thought leadership do so because it creates value for them both personally and within their organizations. On a personal level, we know that consumers of thought leadership don’t just read it; they actually own it. They enjoy sharing it through their social and professional networks and with employees and colleagues. Owning that thought leadership helps executives feel smarter and more in command of what they do.

We find that executives who consume thought leadership see it as a key leverage point for their career advancement. Thought leadership informs them in ways that they wouldn’t easily have been otherwise.

Say more about how thought leadership informs decision-making.

Anthony Marshall: We explicitly asked, “Do you consume thought leadership? If you do consume thought leadership, do you make spending decisions as a consequence, and in what way do you make them?”

We found that executives do make direct spending decisions as a result of thought leadership. The average size of organizations in the United States that we surveyed was $29 billion in revenue. When we quantified executive spending decisions in the United States, we found that a typical executive will spend $184 million annually directly as a consequence of thought leadership.

In addition to direct spending decisions, thought leadership influenced other spend that executives were involved with—in the area of $960 million a year. We were very conservative in the way that we approached that specifically. The direct spend was clear, based on their responses. In the indirect category, being conservative, let’s assume that only 5 percent of that $960 million is actually realized. In the United States, applying even that small number to government and the Fortune 500, the opportunity would be in excess of $100 billion annually. Again, that’s a very conservative number.

If we apply that to the Fortune Global 2000 and consider direct spend alone, it would be $265 billion. If we actually include the 5 percent of indirect spend, then it would increase beyond $370 billion. So these are very large numbers, in terms of spending patterns of businesses that are directly impacted or indirectly impacted by the consumption of thought leadership.

You mentioned that thought leadership improves employee satisfaction. How?

Cindy Anderson: Forty-one percent of our C-suite executives in the survey said that they consider thought leadership to be a great tool for employee engagement.

While we think of producing thought leadership as being good externally—for our clients, business, and relationship development—it also works well internally.

Forty-six percent of the executives in our survey said that consuming thought leadership within their organization boosts employee satisfaction. It makes employees feel good about where they work and feel more confident that they understand how to function in a complex business environment.

What do executives look for in thought leadership?

Cindy Anderson: The research on “what good looks like” shows that executives really focus on five elements—three of which are in the control of the thought leadership producer, and two that are more influenced but actually more valued by the consumer. The initial three are quality, uniqueness, and reach, and the other two are independence and trust:

1. Quality. Executives are seeking proprietary data and insight that originates from lack of bias.
2. Uniqueness. Uniqueness is point of view. Executives are looking for the kind of thought leadership that gives them data that they can trust and a point of view they can rely on.
3. Reach. You’ve got to get your thought leadership in front of your audience so that you can be part of their consideration set.
4. Independence. This component is again, more valued, and means that in addition to being based on data and featuring a strong point of view, your thought leadership is also independent of the commercial aspect of the enterprise. The data shows that the more thought leadership tries to sell, the worse it is at selling. So the goal is to keep it independent of commercial elements.
5. Trust. Trust is based on many elements: the data, the point of view, how it’s sourced, whether it’s independent, and more.

Combined, these five elements can help an organization produce quality thought leadership that will be trusted by the people who consume it.

Anthony Marshall: When executives consume thought leadership, they’re looking for substance, robust analysis, and tangible action that they can implement in their daily lives and businesses. They’re seeking unique insight that they haven’t conceived before, that’s not obvious. They’re also looking for a cadence of provocation and interest.

Like everyone else, executives have their antennas up constantly, so they can sense almost immediately what they’re going to get. As a result, they tend to focus on five trusted, major providers of thought leadership. It’s hard to crack into that five, but if you can, executives give you a lot of license to have big impact on their mindset and business decisions.

How does a thought leader build an audience?

Cindy Anderson: The best ways to attract clients or prospects to thought leadership fall into three categories:

1. One-to-one approach. If you’re a thought leadership producer, you need a mechanism by which you can present your thought leadership directly to an executive. That could be your account team, or your sales team, or whoever has direct conversations with clients.
2. One-to-few approach. An example here could be engaging your marketing or email-marketing team to identify a list of prospects who attended your last event. Again, think of a virtuous cycle where the thought leadership is developed and built with robust data and insightful analysis, and then delivered via the people who can actually get it to clients. This can apply no matter the size of your organization—for example, this could mean your account or marketing teams, or this might be you alone.
3. One-to-many approach. You would engage your marketing team or your own marketing capability for mass initiatives—such as advertising and social media posts—where you might reach people who aren’t necessarily in your target market but where the spillover would be valuable.

How can you know whether your thought leadership is delivering value?

Anthony Marshall: In writing the book, we wanted to deliver on the promise of calculating the ROI of thought leadership, which we determined, on average, is 156 percent. There are lots of variables involved in that. And we have a calculator that people can use whether they’re a big shop or a small shop.

Put simply, ROI is based on the costs that you have and the revenue that you generate. Organizations typically know their own costs. That’s pretty easy to calculate. We calculated an average of some substantial organizations. We didn’t include extensive marketing costs but rather direct costs associated with creating thought leadership.

On the revenue side, our surveys revealed how much spend—for a typical organization—is actually consequential to thought leadership that individuals and executives consume. But there’s also the relationship between that spending and your organization. Do you get to those executives? To make that estimate, you have to calculate how many clients you have and the nature of those clients. Do they consume your thought leadership as opposed to other organizations’ thought leadership? What is your mindshare? That influences the propensity for clients to spend with you.

We made averages based on the data. For example, we found that a large organization that produces thought leadership tends to have its thought leadership consumed by roughly 30 percent of a random set of executives. One’s own clients aren’t a “random set of executives,” because there is an existing relationship. We didn’t assume the relationship but used the conservative 30 percent figure.

We also said, “We know that a typical executive consumes thought leadership from five organizations.” We didn’t say, “Well, 100 divided by five is 20 percent.” No. We said, “You’ve got big monoliths out there. You’ve got the McKinseys that will take a lot more than 20 percent bandwidth typically. So let’s make it only 10 percent. OK, 30 percent penetration; mindshare, 10 percent.”

Again, these are very conservative numbers. Yet if you substitute your own numbers, you might achieve a number in excess of 156 percent. This is not an absolute, because if the thought leadership is not perceived as being independent, those numbers could decrease dramatically. If it is seen as independent, the numbers could increase. So there are sensitivities involved in addition to the parameters.

How do you set up a thought leadership program?

Cindy Anderson: To build a quality thought leadership shop, there are a few elements of an operating model that organizations need to consider—regardless of whether the same person is doing all the roles or whether it’s a large shop with hundreds of people doing much more defined, niche roles.

These key elements include:

Idea lab. This would be a cross-functional organization or a group of people who are conceiving the ideas that are aligned with the business priorities of the organization, with the current happenings in the business environment. You must have the ideas—the concepts, the themes—that you’re going to cover as a thought leadership organization.

Research and analytics hub. Whether you’re conducting your own research or working with a partner—the most valuable ways to create thought leadership—or doing analysis on second- or third-party data, you need to have data-gathering capability. The difference between thought leadership and other types of content is that it’s substantiated with data and insight.

Storytelling wing. You need to have someone who’s writing the content: telling the stories, crafting the narrative, using the data to create the analysis, adding the insight, and delivering it in a way that’s digestible for the audience.

Production and distribution. This is the vehicle for getting your work out there. Once you have the data, the analysis, the story, how do you get it out in front of your existing and potential clients?

Legal and governance protectorate. You don’t want to get yourself into hot water with anything you say and produce.

Strategy squad. From an overall perspective, you want to think about having a a squad to assess how your work is aligned with the business priorities. What might your portfolio look like? Are you going to develop franchise pieces of content annually that you want to be known for? The strategy squad can help develop that portfolio.

Do you have to publish at scale to realize the benefits?

Cindy Anderson: Thought leadership is not a marketing campaign. It’s not an ad. It’s not a news article. It’s a long-term, relationship-building, brand-building approach. It sits at the very top of that awareness and consideration funnel.

If you’re interested in the returns that we outline, you can’t produce and publish one report, share it with a few people, and then wait for your returns to roll in. Thought leadership is an ongoing commitment. It’s an investment in a long-term approach to building the kind of trust that you need with the clients who are going to choose you as one of the top five. That’s how you generate impressive returns.

Does gen AI threaten to commodify thought leadership?

Cindy Anderson: When we wrote the book, we asked AI itself whether AI could produce thought leadership. It said that it couldn’t. AI can only reflect what it has been trained on. The real value of thought leadership is taking original data, applying analysis, and conceiving an original thought.

While AI is useful in many ways, at the moment, it’s not equipped to produce thought leadership in the way that we traditionally think of it: original insights that help make better business decisions. AI is just reiterating what it already knows.

Where AI does have value, though, especially for people in smaller shops, is in situations where people produce one piece of content that’s backed by incredibly robust research. Using AI, they can then create derivatives of that content for an extended period and do it much faster than they could have previously.

In those cases, AI has an existing reference document on which it bases its information. It doesn’t need to generate a particularly original thought. Currently, that’s where we see the real value in AI.

Anthony Marshall: There are multiple intersections between AI and what’s possible within the thought leadership value chain: improving efficiency, speed, and accuracy.

But AI is not about originality, an epiphany, or an aha moment—at least, not yet. If you’re looking to differentiate yourself from others in the thought leadership industry, you need uniqueness. You need something that no one has actually thought of before, communicated in ways that no one has actually communicated it before. AI isn’t good at that, but people are. And when people are not, they need to get good or better at it.

AI is not only really helpful in improving efficiency and speed, but it is also very helpful in pushing people to get better at what they do. That will bode well for improving the quality of thought leadership over time.

How do executives consume thought leadership—in which formats?

Cindy Anderson: Our research revealed some interesting details about how executives like to consume content. We hear repeatedly about short, “snackable” kinds of content: video, infographics, the type of content that you can consume at a glance. Yet our research showed almost exactly the opposite. When executives are consuming thought leadership, they really appreciate the depth of analysis, the lengthy report that they’re investing three hours a week in reading.

Sixty-six percent of executives said they read long-form reports—and other types of traditional content—versus watching video. People watch videos and listen to podcasts, but long-form content, which we expected not to see high on the list, continued to rise to the top. Even more surprising is how many people have heard about the death of PowerPoint. PowerPoint is not dying. Many executives said that they deeply appreciate the use of PowerPoint in delivering thought leadership insights, along with long-form reports. Balance is key. It’s necessary to have a balanced portfolio of content and a balanced way to deliver that content.

Anthony Marshall: When you consider what executives are seeking from thought leadership and what really differentiates it, it’s substance—having robust, unique data that they can’t get elsewhere. Again, they are seeking analysis that they would be proud to share in their own businesses, insights that haven’t occurred to them before, and actions that they could follow up on very readily. These deep analyses provide the backbone of a body of work. They aren’t in the form of a tweet or a brief blog.

A substantial, rigorous backbone can generate compelling, interesting components, such as videos, blogs, or podcasts. Those smaller components are based on the larger, substantive piece. That’s what characterizes an outstanding portfolio of content.

What surprised you most in writing this book?

Cindy Anderson: What surprised me the most was the astounding magnitude of ROI for thought leadership. It was incredibly surprising that we could validate it through data, and we didn’t have to use assumptions, expectations, and guesses.

Anthony Marshall: One of the most surprising things is a duality: on one hand, the high number of individuals and organizations creating thought leadership for which our analysis resonates. Thought leadership is happening all over the place—in every industry, in every country. Given the amount of communication that is possible because of gen AI and the ease of content creation, there is a desire to differentiate and learn the lessons of thought leadership.

On the other hand, there’s a resistance to thought leadership. There’s a perception among some that it doesn’t have credibility. Strong thought leadership stands on par with any academic research in quality, robustness, data, and credibility. It’s created faster and for different reasons, but it’s entirely credible.

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