Marketing performance is facing unprecedented scrutiny. While data and analytics capabilities have reached historical highs, proving the true commercial value of advertising remains an inconsistent and often contentious task across the industry.
At NDA’s Foresight event, Rebecca Sentance, Editor of Retail Media Age, led a panel exploring why defining advertising value is still so challenging and what must change for marketing to be recognised as a genuine engine of business growth.
Despite the abundance of digital signals, connecting media investment directly to incremental growth remains complex. A significant factor in this ongoing struggle is the sheer fragmentation of the modern media landscape.
Mark Brown, CMO at Hovis, highlighted how much harder measurement has become as channels have multiplied.
“Fragmentation makes it very difficult,” Brown said. “When I first started in marketing, there were about three lines on a media plan, and now there are dozens. Alongside that fragmentation is a lack of standardisation. If I am an accountant, there is a set way of measuring financial contribution, but in the world of marketing, we have been guilty of lacking standardisation and a unified way of doing things that everyone buys into.”
Furthermore, the industry’s reliance on platform-specific metrics often obscures the bigger picture.
Katie Atkinson, Head of Product at Havas Media Network, argued that the sector frequently focuses on the wrong indicators.
“We are amazing at measuring data, but the problem is measuring contribution,” Atkinson explained. “We are really guilty of optimising towards metrics like reach, click-through rate, or CPA as if that is the objective of the plan, when the actual objective is business growth and incrementality.”
Atkinson also said that privacy-first approaches outside the US offer an unexpected advantage: “Because we do not have the same heavy reliance on first-party data as the US, it forces us to be a bit cleverer. Panel-based approaches give us a single source of truth across the whole ecosystem rather than just within closed platforms.”
From a publishing and infrastructure perspective, global walled gardens have simplified self-contained reporting, but created broader systemic issues.
Jonathan Haines, Managing Director UK & Northern Europe at Equativ, pointed out how a handful of global platforms impacts the open web.
“Global platforms have made it very easy to prove metrics within their own walls, but you end up with proof points that do not talk to each other,” Haines said. “To address this, we’ve been working with European partners to create The European Media Marketplace, a coalition connecting first-party datasets from publishers, retailers, marketplaces, and telcos.
“By building a single infrastructure across the open web, we can offer the simplicity, scale, and interoperability that allow brands to measure consistently rather than in isolated silos.”
The trap of short-term attribution and the role of leadership
When budgets favor channels with immediate, easily measurable returns, like search or retargeting, brands risk starving long-term growth drivers.
Atkinson emphasised that bottom-of-funnel conversion metrics do not tell the full story.
“Metrics like ROAS on retargeting are not growth metrics; they are temperature checks on the market,” she said. “True business value comes from top-of-funnel activity, mental availability, and brand awareness that actually expands your consumer base, even if it is harder to measure.”
To bridge this gap, Havas developed tools such as multi-incrementality modeling. “It combines econometrics principles with proprietary algorithms and brand tracking data to measure ROAS at the top of the funnel,” Atkinson said. “Privacy-first solutions like these are where European adtech can deliver genuine value.”
However, defending long-term investment requires framing the commercial argument effectively to senior executive leadership.
Brown suggested shifting the conversation with finance leadership from potential gain to potential loss.
“I am trying to re-educate my business that if we do not invest, we will decline,” Brown stated. “It often helps to demonstrate to a CFO how much they will lose if they do not invest, because people really dislike losing money. Re-framing the conversation away from immediate growth and towards what is required to stay afloat is a very effective approach.”
Who ultimately owns the business outcome when marketing investments fail to yield growth? Panelists agreed that accountability spans the entire C-suite, though ownership must remain grounded in marketing expertise.
While Haines said that “all roads lead up to the CEO” for public companies answering to the market, Brown offered a firm perspective on functional responsibility:
“In FMCG, the bottom line rests with the CMO.” However, Brown added a note of caution regarding CEO overreach: “The last thing I want is my CEO telling me where to put my media dollars. The moment accountability is taken away from the marketing leader, you risk decisions being made for the wrong reasons.”
Overhauling the marketing dashboard: What to scrap, what to add
When asked which traditional metric they would permanently remove from their dashboards, the panel pointed to legacy indicators that no longer reflect modern consumer behavior.
Haines singled out last-click attribution, noting that it has been a distraction for many years because while it proves an immediate transaction, it fails to prove true value or attribute credit accurately across the consumer journey.
Atkinson advocated for discarding click-through rate, explaining that while last-click tells you if there is inflation in the market, click-through rate tells you very little about actual business impact.
For Brown, share of voice has outlived its usefulness. It serves as a rear-view mirror metric that indicates who spent the most rather than whether the work was effective, meaning a brand with a small share of voice can still achieve remarkable results that render the traditional measure irrelevant.
Replacing these outdated figures requires metrics focused on true commercial expansion and cross-channel harmony.
Brown called for metrics that evaluate incremental reach and the complementary nature of what is laid down across traditional, retail media, and social channels to build consolidated, non-duplicative reach.
Atkinson highlighted the need to track incremental sales per customer, focusing on net-new growth by measuring incremental people coming out of the funnel rather than just those coming in. Meanwhile, Haines emphasised adopting incremental ROI models across the open web, using independent measurement frameworks to evaluate returns across all media channels equally.
As emerging technologies like generative AI continue to reshape search behaviors and ad formats, panel members agreed that measurement models will need to adapt swiftly. While new indicators like “share of model” are emerging, the underlying objective for marketers remains unchanged: moving beyond superficial attention metrics to deliver clear, undeniable business outcomes.
