I had the honor recently of being on a panel of industry experts at the Google Brandformance Conference discussing the challenges of incremental measurement, and why getting it right has never mattered more. Moderated by Google’s Head of Agency, Chris Marino, panel colleagues included Preston Rutherford, cofounder of Chubbies, Loop Returns, and Marathon, and Olivia Kory, Chief Strategy Officer at Haus.
Here are my key takeaways:
Q. The audience has heard a lot today about the importance of the modern measurement framework — a flywheel of attribution, incrementality testing, and Media Mix Modeling (MMM.) What does this look like in practice for a mid-market brand and how does this provide a more holistic overview?
Getting this right — for any brand, mid-market or otherwise — has always come down to lining up three things: A holistic measurement system, a clear strategic framework, and organizational alignment around a shared set of North Star metrics.
You asked about measurement specifically, and honestly, that’s where I see mid-market brands struggle the most compared to enterprise. It’s no surprise, with fewer resources, less measurement muscle, more noise. But that’s exactly why getting it right matters more.
There’s a reason both Meta and Google — not exactly known for agreeing on much — have spent the past year advocating for a triangulated measurement stack: attribution, incrementality testing, and MMM. That’s not theoretical.
At Measured, we’ve been building and integrating this stack for nearly a decade. Why? Because each of these methods in isolation isn’t just incomplete, it’s dangerous. But together they can become your super power.
- Relying on last-click or pixel-based MTA as your source of truth? That’s a death sentence for growth.
- Stitching together three point solutions and cherry-picking whichever number looks best? That’s stakeholder theater (the loudest voice with the best story wins!) not a measurement system.
- DIY-ing your geo testing with open-source code? Many widely available packages produce inconsistent, untrustworthy results, and it’s actively setting teams back. I see a lot of agencies and vendors out there repackaging and reselling open source code released five years ago.
- Using an agency versed in analytics with measurement experience: fantastic. Relying on your agency as your measurement provider to grade their own homework — I’ll let you guess how that story plays out.
- And please stop running vanity incrementality tests for volume.
If you're not using every single test, especially the ones with no lift, to unlock strategic decisions, you're just lighting time, resources, and budget on fire, not to mention undermining organizational belief in the practice.
Avoid these and get the measurement framework right, and now you have the opportunity to tackle the really important part: turning your measurement system into an organizational muscle that creates business value and drives your strategy.
Q. How do clients simplify this and sell it into their executive team?
Now, the good news: Mid-market brands actually have advantages, if they choose to lead. You’re speedboats, not cruise ships. Aligning cross-functionally on strategy, pressure testing and honing your strategy with measurement, building shared KPIs that create a common language with finance — these are easier when you have fewer silos and less attachment to legacy thinking.
But they still take real work, leadership, and vision.
If there’s one thing I’ve learned above all else in my career, measurement doesn’t work unless it’s tightly tied to organizational strategy and decision-making. New entrants in measurement love to pitch “low-service SaaS solutions” — a black box with a slick dashboard. That’s not a solution, it’s a seed round pitch deck.
I get why they want to sell their investors on low-touch measurement products, but if you expect to succeed with that, you better be prepared to take on the extremely complex task of organizational change management internally. What really happens? You spin your wheels trying to unpack the black box and nobody on your team uses those slick UIs.
I’ve spent nearly seven years at Measured and my entire career in the measurement space building veteran teams that support organizational adoption and change management. These are true measurement experts because they need to be able to explain and help you understand how measurement solutions work and WHY your data is arriving at your answer and what it means. But that’s just the beginning. They spend countless hours rolling up their sleeves with your team to align measurement to your internal processes and build the organizational adoption that is critical to succeed.
If a vendor’s strategy is to throw a model over the fence and let your team sort it out — run. Measurement isn’t just a model or a product. It’s an organizational muscle. And if you don’t build it with care and put in the work to grow and maintain it, even a perfect model (if it existed) and the best tools will fail miserably.