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The digital advertising industry loves a good metric. First came CPMs and CTRs, then Viewability Scores, each promising to be the best thing that would finally make sense of our ad spend.
Yet here we are, still dumping billions into a black hole of nebulous metrics while CFOs demand greater accountability.
Agencies are getting a reluctance to use traditional metrics. Instead, we are asked to connect our work with real business results.
This causes brands anxiety, but it’s not necessary. For us as agency partners, we have the opportunity to be educators on this topic and proactively guide our clients to these business outcome KPIs.
Because we all know the truth: Demands for real, measurable results from brand marketing investments are not over the line. In what other industry would we accept paying full price for a product that delivers less than half of what was promised?
The measurement problems run deep
The current CPM model is broken.
When you pay for an impression, you’re essentially paying for the promise of a bulb. There is no guarantee that those eyeballs are human, biased, or even real. In my experience managing cross-platform campaigns, one of the biggest challenges is controlling frequency and validation across exchanges – a problem that has only gotten worse with the rise of CTV and OLV advertising.
A Peer39 report from earlier this year shows an alarming 28% increase in views of “fake CTV content”. for a period of six months. This is not just waste; it is a systematic destruction of values. The report also showed that nearly half of the ads found on fraudulent inventory belong to Fortune 500 companies. Even the most sophisticated marketing operations and largest budgets fall victim to this broken system.
But scams are just the tip of the iceberg. The real cost comes from the convoluted supply chain that has grown up around CPM buying. Each middleman takes his cut; each platform adds its own fee; and every verification service charges fees for detecting fraud that shouldn’t exist in the first place. The moment your ad reaches a real person (if it ever does), you are lucky if you have 36 cents on your dollar he passed
It’s a lack of accountability that keeps CFOs up at night. When campaigns fail, marketers shrug and point to industry benchmarks. When fraud is discovered and reported, it is usually months after the fact. The whole system is designed to obscure rather than illuminate where your money is really going.
This is not ineffective; it is unsustainable. As marketing budgets face increased scrutiny and economic headwinds continue to blow, we cannot afford to keep pouring money into a system that is so fundamentally out of sync with business results.
The future demands better performance
Real results. Verified results. Real business impact. This is not just wishful thinking; it’s already happening. I see this firsthand with clients who focus on the performance metrics that matter. The key is openness to testing and adopting new technologies and approaches.
Working with new platforms like video buying platform Blockboard, along with our established media partnerships, we’ve seen promising results for CTV’s programmatic advertising campaigns. Through these complementary partners, we see better results from client campaigns that focus on performance metrics such as sales and revenue. This is a direct result of using advanced verification capabilities and detailed transparency at the program level.
It’s not just about avoiding fraud. It’s about understanding exactly where ads are appearing and how they work. When we can track performance down to the program level, not just the source of inventory, we can optimize for real business results rather than proxy metrics.
Take what’s happening on your connected TV. Fraud and waste are not yet so prominent here. But you’re already seeing agencies trying to pass on dark viewership metrics for ads that might run during fake programming.
Today, technology exists to track the impact of an ad from impression to purchase. We don’t have to keep relying on guesswork.
Under traditional models, advertisers bear all the risk with no guaranteed returns. With results-based performance, salespeople put their money where their mouth is.
The way forward is clear: We need to focus on building awareness that actually leads to leads or sales. This means being able to “hijack the journey” or turn top-of-the-journey awareness activities into measurable conversion events. We’re already seeing this work with platforms that can verify actual human engagement and control frequency across exchanges. And it’s about time.
“On TV and video” is a column exploring the opportunities and challenges in advanced television and video.
Follow Marcus Thomas and AdExchanger is LinkedIn.
