Why transparent measurement should reshape where dollars flow
The open internet’s advantage has always been transparency and independent signals about advertising performance. Its next challenge is turning those signals into decision clarity for advertisers.
Marketers today have more measurement signals than ever before. Yet many still struggle to answer one of the most practical questions in advertising: Where should the next dollar go?
Over the past two decades, the industry has built an extraordinary set of tools to measure advertising performance. Marketing mix models estimate long-term channel contribution. Attribution systems track short-term conversion influence. Brand lift studies measure shifts in perception. Incrementality experiments estimate causal impact. Attention signals describe how audiences engage with media.
Although each tool answers an important question about performance, together, they often leave marketers with a new challenge: How to interpret signals across platforms and environments.
Inside large platforms such as Google and Meta, performance appears simpler because the same company sells the media, measures the outcomes and defines the metrics used to evaluate success.
The open internet works differently. It is built on a diverse ecosystem of publishers, technology platforms and independent measurement partners generating signals about advertising performance. That independence creates transparency — but it can also make interpretation harder when signals come from many different sources.
Navigating the factors that shape advertising for each brand
The challenge becomes even clearer when you consider how many factors shape advertising outcomes beyond media alone.
Different brands operate under very different economic realities. A brand such as Pampers sells a product purchased weekly with significant lifetime value, while a brand like Tabasco may only be purchased once or twice a year. Marketing science often discusses examples like these to illustrate how category economics shape expected advertising returns.
Audience strategy matters as well. Campaigns designed to drive loyalty among existing buyers typically deliver stronger short-term returns than those aimed at reaching non-buyers and growing category penetration. Yet penetration growth is often the source of long-term brand growth.
In other words, advertising performance rarely reflects media alone. It is the interaction of brand economics, audience strategy, creative effectiveness and the environment in which the ad appears.
The influence of content
This dynamic became particularly clear during my time at NBCUniversal, where we explored ways to measure something the industry had long assumed but rarely quantified: the influence of the content environment itself.
Television had historically been bought largely on reach — what I often described as a “tonnage” model that treated impressions as interchangeable. Yet we consistently observed that the environment surrounding an ad could significantly shape how that advertising performed.
To better understand this dynamic, we introduced a Content Quality Index designed to combine traditional reach metrics with signals about the programming environment and the resonance of the advertising creative. The goal was to create a more persistent signal of advertising impact — one that reflected not just how many people saw an ad, but the quality of the context in which it appeared.
What the work consistently showed was simple but important: Two campaigns with similar reach could produce very different outcomes depending on where the ad appeared.
The lesson was clear. Not all impressions carry the same value.
Yet most advertising markets still price impressions largely the same way for everyone.
As measurement signals become clearer, platforms have an opportunity to help advertisers interpret these differences. A parenting show on connected television may be extraordinarily valuable for a diaper brand but far less relevant for other categories. A sports streaming environment may deliver the opposite pattern.
When signals about outcomes, environment quality, audience alignment and creative performance are considered together, it becomes easier to see which environments truly create value for different brands.
If different impressions carry different values for different brands, then optimizing which advertisers appear in which environments can increase the overall value of the inventory.
The industry does not need another measurement system. It already produces rich independent signals about performance. What marketers increasingly need is a decision infrastructure that helps interpret those signals in context.
When advertisers can clearly see which environments create the most value for their brands, they naturally begin to allocate investment toward those environments. And when that happens, media is no longer priced simply by impressions — it begins to be priced by the outcomes it actually delivers.
This op-ed represents the views and opinions of the author and not of The Current, a division of The Trade Desk, or The Trade Desk. The appearance of the op-ed on The Current does not constitute an endorsement by The Current or The Trade Desk.