QN#16: 10 Measurement trends to shape your marketing strategy
The pressure on marketing teams is greater than ever: do more with less, justify every dollar of investment, and demonstrate a tangible impact on business results. However, this growing demand for accountability comes at a time when the measurement ecosystem is more complex and fragmented. The reduction of digital identifiers, the consolidation of modeling over deterministic measurement and the emergence of new technologies are forcing all professionals to re-evaluate their tools and methodologies.
Navigating this environment isn't about blindly adopting every new technology or methodology, but about developing the strategic judgment to discern between hype and genuine, lasting trends. In this edition, we cut through the noise to analyze the underlying changes that are truly shaping the future of marketing measurement.
If you see your company far from the examples provided, the best you can do is to keep reading Quantified Nation and bring it to your whole team:
Increasing demands to do more with less. The C-suite's focus has shifted from "Is marketing delivering a positive ROI?" to "Is marketing delivering the maximum possible ROI for this budget level?". This requires a deeper, more nuanced understanding of marginal returns.
Example: The CFO is no longer satisfied with a report showing a 3 campaign ROAS. She now asks, "Your MMM should show us our position on the response curve for this channel. Could we have achieved 90% of these sales with 70% of the budget and re-invested the savings in a channel with higher marginal returns?".
Effectiveness will continue growing in importance. The conversation is maturing from short-term attribution to a holistic, business-oriented view of effectiveness, championed by figures like Les Binet, Peter Field or Byron Sharp. This involves connecting brand-building activities to long-term financial outcomes.
Example: A brand manager, instead of merely presenting a Brand Lift Study, now uses a nested MMM to demonstrate how a 2-point increase in "brand consideration" is projected to increase baseline sales by 0.5% over the next 18 months, directly linking brand investment to long-term value.
More GenAI applications in marketing measurement. Generative AI is moving from being a novelty to a practical co-pilot for specific, time-consuming measurement tasks, automating data processing and insight generation.
Example: An analyst uses an LLM, like in our NotebookLM experiment for the QN#15 edition about Google’s research on MMM, to process and thematically tag thousands of open-ended survey responses about creative assets. This transforms unstructured qualitative feedback into a quantitative variable that can be incorporated into an MMM to score and measure the impact of different messaging strategies.
More integrated measurement platforms. The industry is shifting away from siloed tools and toward unified platforms that synthesize multiple data sources (MMM, experiments, attribution) into a single, cohesive framework, as envisioned in the Modern Measurement Playbook.
Example: A Head of Measurement no longer presents three separate slide decks. Instead, they use a unified dashboard where the MMM’s top-down ROI is calibrated with recent geo-lift experiment results , and real-time attribution data is used to diagnose short-term performance anomalies within the MMM's strategic context.
More "agent-based" automation in measurement. Beyond simple dashboards, we're seeing the rise of autonomous AI "agents" that can monitor, diagnose, and even act on data according to pre-defined rules, reducing the need for constant human intervention.
Example: An automated agent is programmed to monitor campaign performance. If it detects a key channel’s incremental ROAS has dropped below a set threshold for 48 hours, it automatically pauses the lowest-performing ad groups and messages the channel manager with a diagnostic summary and a suggested hypothesis to test.
Still, most critical marketing decisions will be human-led. Despite vast automation, the final strategic calls—those requiring business context, competitive foresight, and organizational navigation—remain firmly in human hands.
Example: An MMM strongly recommends shifting 30% of the budget from YouTube to Paid Search. The CMO, however, aware of a major competitor's upcoming brand launch, overrides the model's output. She opts for a more conservative 15% shift to maintain Share of Voice during a critical period—a strategic nuance the model cannot comprehend and an example of avoiding an "insulting recommendation".
Modeling will continue to gain momentum over deterministic measurement. With signal loss from cookie deprecation, URL identifiers, closer scrutiny on local storage, consent requirements or much darker methodologies, relying on observed, user-level "census" data is no longer viable. Modeled and inferred data has become a necessity for a complete picture.
Example: An e-commerce brand's weekly report no longer features a metric called "last-click conversions". It now reports on "modeled data-driven conversions," a metric that statistically estimates total conversions by modeling the behavior of unconsented users based on the observed behavior of consented users, providing a more holistic and accurate figure.
Marketing Mix Modeling will become a core MarTech feature. MMMs are rapidly moving from expensive, one-off consulting projects to always-on, democratized features embedded within major marketing technology platforms, making them accessible to a much wider range of companies.
Example: A mid-sized company, which previously could not afford a full-scale MMM project, now utilizes an integrated MMM tool within their marketing automation suite. Following the path of open-source solutions like Google’s Meridian and Meta’s Robyn, this tool provides them with weekly-updated ROI estimates and budget scenarios.
More rigorous testing driven by formal learning agendas. The practice of experimentation is maturing from running ad-hoc tests to executing against a structured, long-term "learning agenda" designed to systematically answer the most critical business questions.
Example: A marketing team’s learning agenda for the quarter isn't "test Demand Gen". It's "Determine the optimal Demand Gen spend in combination with video ads in Meta and TikTok." This shifts the focus from tactical wins to durable strategic insights.
Growing importance of validated proxy metrics. Given the difficulty of measuring long-term effects directly, sophisticated marketers are increasingly relying on validated, fast-moving proxy metrics as leading indicators of future success. Do not get confused with campaign metrics which have no correlation with effectiveness.
Example: An automotive brand's MMM has validated that its "Share of Search" has a 6-month leading correlation with market share. The team now actively uses SoS as a primary quarterly KPI, allowing them to optimize brand-building investment with much greater agility than waiting for semi-annual market share reports.
These ten trends are not isolated events; they all together push measurement in a clear direction. The overarching theme is a definitive shift away from fragmented, channel-specific reporting and toward a holistic, integrated measurement framework designed to guide strategic business decisions.
The challenge for every marketing and analytics leader is no longer just about adopting a new tool or methodology, but about building a resilient and intelligent system and a team that can thrive through this complexity. The goal is not to find a single source of truth (let’s not talk about it anymore!), but to master the art and science of combining these diverse inputs into a coherent strategy that drives sustainable growth.
Industry updates
Google’s Effectiveness Equation
Google has just released a new 69-page white paper on effectiveness. This work has all the ingredients to become a reference today and in the future, the same way that the 2019 paper “Three Grand Challenges”.
This new paper consists of six chapters, covering key areas such as ROI, long-term marketing impact, marketing's effect on price elasticity, smart use of first-party data, effective Marketing and Finance collaboration.
It is a must read for every marketer today so download it and save some quality time to go over it.
Nielsen + Google on the value of AI-powered campaigns
Nielsen has released a case study called The ROI of AI to quantify the bottom line impact of adding AI to campaigns.
It's always valuable when large-scale effectiveness studies are made public, and the recent MMM analysis by Nielsen on Google's AI-powered ad solutions is no exception. The report provides compelling, data-backed benchmarks, suggesting ROAS uplifts of up to 17% for AI-driven campaigns over manual ones. While any robust MMM analysis is a welcome addition to the conversation, it is crucial to consider the context.
The methodology remains unclear. The text mentions “measuring over 50,000 brand campaigns and over 1 million performance campaigns in the U.S. across their AI tools.” This does not look like an MMM or even an MMM meta-analysis. Would love to see more details. The numbers could refer to the whole database but it’s tricky and as a study commissioned by the platform itself, the findings are naturally framed to highlight the benefits of their ecosystem. For marketers, the key is to use these benchmarks not as a universal guarantee, but as a powerful starting point to inform their own rigorous testing and validation.
An alternative to measurement triangle
There have been some public positions by Koen Pauwels and Grace Kite advocating for a new measurement model besides the measurement triangle recommended by Google in 2020.
A full proposal can be read in this November 2024 IPA free report (link). The document is full of sensible, useful and realistic advice, hard to disagree with. However, the news on that proposal is what it’s not included: multitouch attribution. In general terms, while we are fully aware of the limitations of MTA, we would not agree to remove it from a measurement framework altogether. There’s so much detail and nuance in digital media buying that won’t be able to be fully captured either by MMM or experiments, where marketers need insights. Of course one should be aware of its limitations and avoid doing things wrong (like last click attribution), but that is mostly included in existing frameworks of good measurement.
System1 and Effie publish a white paper on creativity
The analysis uses System1 copy-testing methodology and combines it with the huge Effie database. The 41 pages report can be downloaded here and contains multitude of great charts. In particular we loved the following insights:
Markets that have higher confident on running their discipline use business-oriented metrics, while the ones with less confidence use intermediate metrics.
The high value of long-running and consistent campaigns
The importance of “brand codes” beyond the logo (as they say in the report, in other places these are called “iconic assets”. There’s a wealth of assets that can be used such as recognizable shapes, fonts, jingles…
This paper again keeps challenging the Ehrenberg-Bass school of thought. For all brands, both differentiation and distinctiveness are equally important. However, the value of differentiation (vs. distinctiveness) is particularly high for challenger brands.
Chart of the week
Summer is here! We can’t think of another most relevant topic in this time of the year. In particular, we are having the first heatwave in Spain so we wanted to look at summer-related query trends. This Google Trends chart perfectly illustrates the country's collective mindset as the heat sets in. It's remarkable to see the clockwork-like consistency of these seasonal searches year after year.
As expected, "Playa" (beach) leads the charge, consistently forming the highest peak each summer, closely followed by the general search for "Verano" (summer). Meanwhile, "Piscina" (swimming pool) and "Aire Acondicionado" (air conditioning) follow the same annual pattern, representing the practical solutions Spaniards seek to enjoy or escape the rising temperatures. The 2025 season seems to be shaping up right on schedule!
If we zoom in at queries for “Aire Acondicionado” (air conditioning) and let Google Trends complete the data for June, here’s what you will see:
While the annual pattern is a given, the intensity of the peaks varies significantly from one year to the next, acting as a proxy for the severity of Spain's summer heatwaves.
The data for this last week of June is particularly telling. We are witnessing an almost vertical surge in interest, suggesting that the first major heatwave of 2025 has hit the public consciousness hard and fast.