New Year, clean slate, and a chance for stronger organizational alignment on marketing solutions that will advance your strategic goals in 2025. As we quickly approach the end of the year, Measured’s executive team is excited to share some of the measurement and optimization approaches that forward-thinking marketers should consider when making plans for a successful, high-performance New Year. Here we go:
Trevor Testwuide, CEO
A triangulated media measurement methodology will be the foundation of a modernized approach to media optimization in 2025. It's the best solution for marketers in the privacy era because it ensures you have a comprehensive, agile, and accurate single source of truth. Triangulation means bringing together incrementality testing, Media Mix Modeling (MMM), and platform attribution for a full-funnel measurement and optimization workflow that helps align teams on core objectives so they can make unified marketing investment decisions with speed and confidence.
This true apples-to-apples comparison of performance data across channels is important because different techniques in isolation tend to favor one type of channel over another. Equalizing performance across channels is critical to enabling budget allocation optimizations that maximize return on investment.
What This Means for Marketers
A triangulation methodology is essential because some measurement techniques are very short-term biased, while others are better at measuring the cumulative long-term impact of marketing. Triangulation done correctly, however, requires advanced analytics expertise to effectively line up various non-congruent data sources, and there are many steps to integrating data, modeling, and analytics and weighting them appropriately. Even if you can cross that hurdle, it’s too easy to simply use them as a point of comparison and never achieve an integrated methodology that results in a single source of truth for your team.
How to Position Yourself for Success
Very few platforms in the market are able to do this and many marketers end up piecing this together themselves. Triangulation is hard. Doing three things separately means you end up being subject to three answers and organizational alignment becomes impossible. Make sure your team is fully informed on the implications of doing this in-house versus finding a qualified media measurement and optimization partner. Measured, for example, does full MMM + triangulation for some brands, and we also work to integrate custom MMM into a triangulated platform for daily operations with other brands. There is no one-size-fits-all approach.
Nick Stoltz, COO
Multi-KPI Testing will become a must-have capability for best-in-class marketers. Over the last 12-24 months most brands woke up to the fact that incrementality testing was a must-have capability and platform conversion lift studies weren’t enough. Looking to 2025, brands are beginning to realize that Multi-KPI Testing is the next evolution of this capability if you want to understand how your marketing efforts impact omnichannel (ecommerce + retail + Amazon). Or if you want to understand how marketing drives near-term sales as well as awareness, or understand incremental ROAS and cost per new customer acquisition, or how to drive lift at the product category or customer segment level. Multi-KPI Testing is the answer to all of those questions.
What This Means for Marketers
Multi-KPI Testing is a big unlock for marketers with potentially huge business returns. Efficiently allocating across omnichannel sales is critical to supporting growth strategy and driving optimal returns. In order to properly allocate budget to upper-funnel media, you must understand both its impact on sales and also how it affects the full consideration cycle.
Channels that drive efficient new customer acquisition deserve more budget that incremental ROAS alone would dictate. Finally, if you want to move toward truly optimizing your budget against a CAC-LTV framework, you must understand how to drive lift in the product and customer segments that you know drive higher lifetime value for your brand.
How to Position Yourself for Success
First, you need the capability. This is not an easy data science problem, and very few teams have the experience to do it well. Second, you need a strategy: Line up Multi-KPI Testing against the most pressing questions for your brand. Third, you need organizational commitment from the top down to see this through.
Mahesh Jeswani, Chief Product Officer
AI is set to redefine measurement systems in 2025, making them more intelligent, precise, and actionable than ever before. Breakthroughs in natural language processing (NLP) and large language models (LLMs) will transform raw data into business-contextual insights with human-level understanding. This evolution will allow marketers to access deeper, more sophisticated insights in real-time, empowering critical decision-making with unprecedented ease.
What This Means for Marketers
AI and GenAI will elevate marketing analytics from simply understanding "what happened" to uncovering "why it happened," a task traditionally reliant on human interpretation. With contextualized insights, AI will enable marketers — even those without specialized analytical skills — to interpret data like seasoned analysts. This democratization of insights will empower more team members across the organization to make effective, data-driven decisions.
How to Position Yourself for Success
To harness these advancements, marketers should cultivate a culture of learning and experimentation, exploring AI’s full potential and customizing it to fit their brand and team needs. Streamlining and governing data pipelines for effective AI training will become increasingly crucial. Agility will also be essential, enabling quick, iterative adjustments based on real-time insights to stay competitive in an AI-powered landscape.
Alex Lawrence, VP, Client Partner
Audience Split Testing/Randomized Controlled Trials will continue to become more important. Marketers will continue to struggle to reliably target specific individuals, either as a result of privacy regulations or competitive decisions by Walled Gardens trying to control more of the spending optimizations (i.e., ASC, PMAX). As a result, there will be an increased focus on “owning” communication channels to directly engage with your consumers. Leveraging the gold standard of randomized controlled trials against these audiences at a user level will be an important part of the measurement approach going forward.
What This Means for Marketers
More than ever before, marketers need to make a compelling case to the CEO/CFO/Board that their media spend is acting as fuel to the business and not as dead weight. They need to be able to know things like: What is the incremental cost of acquiring a new customer, and does every dollar we spend deliver a positive contribution margin to the business? Marketers need to focus on building audience — the larger your engaged audience, the larger a pool you can use to build your business. Focus on testing these audience segments to build up a solid foundation.
How to Position Yourself for Success
Marketers must have a tool in place to understand which segments over/underperform on a statistically significant basis so you can modify strategy accordingly. Build out channels where you “own” the communication (email, SMS, newsletters, blogs). The more you speak directly to the customer, the more efficient it will be to modify messaging, offers, and communications in ways that impact the business most positively. Implement a tool like Measured that allows you to directly and accurately quantify how what you are doing impacts the bottom line.
Terence Einhorn, VP Solutions Architect, Head of Insights
Marketers are becoming more aware of the shortcomings of traditional Media Mix Modeling (MMM), and they are quickly learning that MMMs must be validated and calibrated with test and control measurement to be credible, especially with the rise of AI-based media tactics like PMAX and ASC.
What This Means for Marketers
Adding an incrementality capability in 2025 should be a priority for marketers who leverage MMM to make tactical investment decisions. For those yet to onboard an MMM solution, consideration of incrementality capabilities will be key criteria in vendor selection.
How to Position Yourself for Success
Equip your team with the resources and authorization to run frequent incrementality experiments, either in-house or leveraging a third-party provider. Even better, leverage a partner who has automated the process of MMM calibration using Incrementality Experiments.
Liz Garza, SVP, Customer Success
Hyper-personalization will come in many forms in 2025. AI-driven insights will move at the pace of decision making for brands, with predictive analytics and dynamic dashboards unique to the business problem being solved. There is no one-size-fits-all, so marketers need to do their research and not buy into just the flashy objects.
Data integrations and unified customer views in an omnichannel view will also be a huge focus in 2025. Marketing analytics platforms will increasingly integrate with more marketing channels, CRMs, and customer touchpoints. This will enable a more comprehensive view of customer journeys, helping teams understand broader data patterns and deliver more actionable insights as they continue to solve one of the biggest challenges that customers still face: Siloed data that results in siloed decision making.
Outcome-based success will continue to be the imperative. Instead of merely tracking usage and satisfaction metrics, there will be an increased tie to measurable business outcomes that will involve understanding and aligning with clients as strategic partners. If you aren’t solving your client’s unique problems to help drive performance, you’ll be pushed to the sidelines. At Measured, this is exactly our approach. We are customer-centric, motivated, and driven by winning big with our customers.
What This Means for Marketers
While we will continue to see AI-driven insights take a leap in 2025, human expertise and strategic partnership will not be replaced and will remain a core focus for many businesses as we all navigate this new and profoundly complex ecosystem. Understanding the full 360-view of what marketers are dealing with should be a top priority as hyper personalization and AI accelerate throughout 2025.
How to Position Yourself for Success
You have to lean in harder, be clear on your outcomes, and push yourself outside your comfort zone to look at media through a different lens. Getting uncomfortable with the “new comfortable” means embracing the evolution of triangulation, AI, human expertise, etc. to drive ultimate game-changing movements in business. We see this time and again, when you line up the right attitudes, internal commitments, and time and energy, the results will start to speak for themselves.