The future of measurement is set it and forget it, says Ty Ahmad-Taylor, Kantar’s chief product officer, on this week’s episode of AdExchanger Talks.
In his view, we’re heading toward a world – although we arguably already live in it – where marketers set their goals and budgets, then mostly get out of the way while platforms and AI do all the work, from media planning and budget allocation to optimization and measurement.
The money is already moving that way, with billions flowing into platform tools that ask marketers to sit back just and trust the system. Last year, Meta – Ahmad-Taylor’s former employer – told investors that the annual run rate for its end-to-end automated ad products, including Advantage+, had already reached $60 billion.
“As a media buyer and as a brand, you have to get to a place of comfort with being much more hands-off-the-steering-wheel,” says Ahmad-Taylor, who joined Kantar in October after two years as Snap’s VP of product growth and, before that, more than five years as a VP of product marketing at Meta.
But then there’s that whole black–box-grade-your-own-homework thing. How much can marketers really trust platforms to report on their own performance?
In Ahmad-Taylor’s view, walled gardens are highly incentivized to be honest and act in good faith. He pushes back on the notion that platforms would intentionally inflate their numbers.
But he also acknowledges that “objective truth” is hard to come by when dueling measurement methodologies – last click, multitouch attribution, media mix modeling – all tell different stories.
Which is to say, even with all the data in the world, there’s no single version of reality.
“There’s not 100% truth,” Ahmad-Taylor says. “What we can get is an approximation if a person is willing to accept certain constraints on your ability to measure across platforms.”
Also in this episode: Why performance advertisers are embracing brand marketing (and brand marketers are spending more on performance), what it means to measure at the “speed of culture” (when a TikTok trend can peak and die before a campaign brief even gets approved) and Ahmad-Taylor’s detour through cooking school (plus his current favorite dish).
