The digital advertising industry loves a good metric. First came CPMs and click-through rates, then viewability scores, each promising to be the silver bullet that would finally make sense of our advertising spend.
Yet here we are, still throwing billions into a black hole of nebulous metrics while CFOs demand more accountability.
Agencies are getting pushback on the use of traditional metrics. Instead, we’re being asked to tie our work to real business outcomes.
This causes angst for brands, but it doesn’t need to. There’s an opportunity for us as agency partners to be the educators on this topic and proactively lead our clients toward these business outcome KPIs.
Because we all know the truth: The demands for actual, measurable results for brand marketing investments are not out of line. In what other industry would we accept paying full price for a product that delivers less than half of what was promised?
The problems with measurement run deep
The existing CPM model is broken.
When you pay for impressions, you’re essentially paying for the promise of eyeballs. There’s zero guarantee those eyeballs are human, engaged or even real. In my experience managing cross-platform campaigns, one of the biggest challenges is controlling frequency and verification across exchanges – a problem that’s only gotten worse with the rise of CTV and OLV advertising.
A Peer39 report earlier this year shows an alarming 28% increase in “fake CTV content” impressions over a six-month period. That’s not just waste; it’s systematic value destruction. The report also showed that nearly half of ads found on fraudulent inventory belong to Fortune 500 companies. Even the most sophisticated marketing operations and largest budgets are falling victim to this broken system.
But fraud is just the tip of the iceberg. The real cost comes from the convoluted supply chain that’s grown up around CPM buying. Every middleman takes their cut; every platform adds their fee; and every verification service charges for catching fraud that shouldn’t exist in the first place. By the time your ad reaches an actual human (if it ever does), you’re lucky if 36 cents of your dollar made it through.
It’s this lack of accountability that’s keeping CFOs up at night. When campaigns underperform, vendors shrug and point to industry benchmarks. When fraud is discovered and pointed out, it’s typically months after the fact. The entire system is designed to obscure rather than illuminate where your money actually goes.
This isn’t inefficient; it’s unsustainable. As marketing budgets face increased scrutiny and economic headwinds continue to blow, we can’t afford to keep pouring money into a system that’s so fundamentally misaligned with business outcomes.
The future demands better performance
Real outcomes. Verified results. Actual business impact. This isn’t just wishful thinking; it’s already happening. I’m seeing it firsthand with clients who shift their focus to performance metrics that matter. The key is being open to testing and adopting new technologies and approaches.
We’ve seen promising results for CTV programmatic ad campaigns by working with emerging platforms like video buying platform Blockboard alongside our established media partnerships. Through these complementary partners, we’re seeing improved client campaign outcomes that focus on performance metrics, such as sales and revenue. This is a direct result of applying advanced verification capabilities and granular program-level transparency.
This isn’t just about avoiding fraud. It’s about understanding exactly where ads run and how they perform. When we can track performance down to the program level rather than just the inventory source, we can optimize for real business outcomes rather than proxy metrics.
Take what’s happening in connected TV. The fraud and waste isn’t as pronounced here yet. But already you see agencies trying to pass murky viewership metrics for ads that might run during fake programming.
Technology exists today to track an ad’s impact from impression to purchase. We don’t need to keep relying on guesswork.
Under traditional models, advertisers shoulder all the risk with no guaranteed returns. With outcomes-based performance, vendors put their money where their mouth is.
The path forward is clear: We need to focus on driving awareness that actually converts into leads or sales. This means having the ability to “hijack the funnel,” or turning upper-funnel awareness activities into measurable conversion events. We’re already seeing this work with platforms that can verify real human engagement and control frequency across exchanges. And it’s about time.
“On TV & Video” is a column exploring opportunities and challenges in advanced TV and video.
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