Measure What Matters: Inspiration from the World’s Most Innovative Companies

“TV advertising is a leap of faith.”

“Of course, we’re comparing apples to oranges.” 

“We can track to the click, but not all the way to the sale.” 

“We have to use this as a proxy.” 

“Attribution is messy at best.” 

“We can’t measure that.” 

“We have a lot of data but it’s not connected.” 

Do any of these sound familiar? Do all of them sound familiar? As a marketer, I can tell you that on my previous teams we never felt we had all the data we needed, or that we didn’t have giant blind spots. Good marketers aren’t settling for that anymore, though.

I wrote recently about how our clients, some of the most innovative companies in the world, are using data collaboration to transform their customer experience. Today I want to talk about measurement, which has been a thorn in marketers’ sides for a long time. The things our clients are doing today with measurement were truly unimaginable a few years ago—the stuff of our wildest dreams.

I can honestly say that what is possible in measurement today is thrilling, especially because for several years we were told that accurate measurement was only going to get harder, that third-party cookies and mobile identifiers would go away and we’d be worse off than ever. Thank goodness the naysayers were so wrong.

LiveRamp clients—from iconic consumer brands and tech platforms to retailers, financial services, and healthcare leaders—have been demonstrating the wide range of measurement capabilities that data collaboration enables. They’re measuring the impact of each marketing channel, tactic, and piece of creative at a level never before possible, and optimizing campaigns in real time with this new information to make more strategic investments and drive return on ad spend. Here are some of my favorite examples.

Closing the loop

With closed-loop measurement, marketers can match ad exposure data with sales data and measure the true incrementality of a campaign. Pinterest Marketing Albertsons Media Collective have had a thriving collaboration to do just that, announcing in 2023 that they had formed an ongoing partnership to deliver closed-loop reporting for brands advertising with Albertsons’ retail media network. In a packed session at RampUp 2024, Carrie Sweeney , VP of Retail at Pinterest, and Evan Hovorka , VP of Product & Innovation at @Albertsons Media Collective, shared the results of a test campaign they had done with snacking giant Mondelēz International to extend reach and drive sales for Triscuit crackers. 

Pinterest and Albertsons Media Collective combined their first-party data sets in LiveRamp’s collaboration environment, enabling Triscuit to reach new audiences and improve campaign measurement. And the efforts paid off! The three companies ran a targeted charcuterie campaign, serving ads on the Pinterest platform, Albertsons.com, and off-site channels. With closed-loop reporting, Pinterest and Albertsons could quantify campaign performance with precision—Triscuit experienced an incremental lift of 16% in sales and units and 19% in purchasers!

These results were impressive, but Sweeney and Hovorka were especially excited about what they meant more broadly. They would finally be able to measure true business impact, unlocking endless possibilities for the future of advertising. As Sweeney put it:

“It feels funny now—with other partners who aren’t in a clean room yet, we will talk about CPC going down 4% week over week. It’s so far away from what actually matters. We used those signals valiantly when they were all we had, but it is just so much better to talk about actual matched ad exposure data.” 

Measuring across screens

Gone are the days when the effectiveness of each channel had to be measured in isolation—and channels like TV could only be measured by age and gender based on a panel and not the individual. The new tools allow us to understand the customer journey across all devices and offer apples-to-apples comparison across linear, digital, OTT, mobile, and social channels. 

Marketers can do multi-touch attribution, quantifying the impact of each customer touchpoint on a sale. We could only dream about that kind of capability in the past! Remember how we’d begrudgingly give credit to the first or last click that generated the sale, even though we knew other channels and impressions had played a role? And of course, there was a time we couldn’t do any direct attribution at all. How far we’ve come.

Even highly regulated industries like pharma are recognizing the incredible possibilities afforded by the latest measurement capabilities. AbbVie , for example, never had the tools to link patient actions to its marketing efforts and ensure they were connecting the right people with life-changing medicines. With privacy and compliance as guiding principles, they partnered with LiveRamp to enable cross-screen measurement. They now have a holistic, connected customer view and can act on new insights in real time. They are even measuring the impact of TV ads for the first time. The bottom line is, our clients feel more connected with their customers and are able to make a positive difference in patients’ lives. As Jaime Date , Senior Director of Measurement and Data Science at AbbVie told us, “Nobody knew this was even a capability that could exist a few years ago. It’s been really exciting.” 

Making things easier

Data collaboration has not only unlocked new ways of measuring, it has made accurate measurement easier. In a webinar LiveRamp recently hosted with The Hershey Company , Kyle Shank , Head of Media Technology, Analytics, and Operations, talked about how Hershey uses a single platform (a LiveRamp Clean Room) that can measure campaigns across all programmatic channels, media channels, and walled gardens, and can connect data seamlessly across clouds. 

Being able to measure campaign performance across all media environments and access all customer data in one place, as well as democratize access for internal teams, results in much faster speed to insight (we’ve seen it faster by 4x or more with clients). 

That means it’s faster and easier to act on insights. Marketers can seamlessly optimize campaigns in flight, so they aren’t wasting precious time or budget. The Hershey team, for example, uses their new consolidated insights to nimbly optimize their campaigns at both brand and portfolio levels, making their spend more efficient and ROAS higher. They have made their advertising work harder for them.

Doing better marketing

These are just a few examples. Our clients are also analyzing and managing the reach and frequency of their advertising more effectively, pinpointing optimal frequency that doesn’t cause audience fatigue, measuring customer lifetime value by segment, simulating campaign performance, and much more. 

The results? Better strategy. Better marketing. Better use of resources. Better information for internal leadership. Better business results. And most importantly, better understanding of exactly who our best customers are—and a stronger connection with them, as we see what truly resonates. All this with consumer privacy and transparency at the forefront of our efforts. 

New measurement solutions are helping bold, innovative teams deliver better brand and business results than ever before. This is the future of marketing. What are you waiting for?