James Bayes, VP ANZ, The Trade Desk
A campaign report can be a comforting thing.
As FY26 numbers land, plenty of Australian marketers will be looking at dashboards full of healthy ROAS, efficient CPMs and strong platform-attributed conversions. On paper, everything looks good.
But there is a more important question: did it actually grow the business?
That question matters because FY27 is underway and the budget is still moving. Getting your Dashboard to show green isn’t the problem. Mistaking platform performance for business performance is. When dashboards are treated as proof of growth rather than one input into the decision, they stop challenging assumptions and start reinforcing them.
Or, as a partner said to me recently, asking a walled garden to measure its own performance is a bit like asking your gran if you look good. There is only one answer you're ever going to get.
When good metrics lead to bad decisions
ROAS often rewards the easiest sale, not the most valuable growth. Spend more on people who were already likely to buy and the number improves, even as incremental impact declines.
Platform-attributed conversions can create a similar illusion. Because each platform uses its own attribution model, marketers can end up with reports where attributed conversions exceed the total sales the business actually recorded.
The consequence is bigger than reporting. It shapes where the next dollar goes. When campaign reports reward what is easiest to measure, budgets naturally follow. Last-click favours the channel closest to conversion, and CPM rewards the cheapest impression. Platform attribution goes one better, and reward the platform doing the measuring.
The result is a system optimised for efficiency, not necessarily genuine business growth.
Jeremy Bullmore, the famous British adman once called 'adland's greatest philosopher', once told a story about how a colleague took him to lunch and insisted on driving him back to the office in his new Aston Martin. When Bullmore asked why he'd bought it, the colleague said he'd seen an advertisement for the car. Then he added that he'd first seen that advertisement when he was fourteen. The ad had done its work three decades before the sale, and no attribution model built for a single quarter could ever have connected a £50,000 purchase back to its root.
Premium brand-building behaves the same way: it shapes what people want long before they're in-market, and most of that effect never surfaces in a short-term optimisation report.
WARC's Multiplier Effect research estimates that over-investing in performance advertising can sacrifice 20–50% of potential revenue return, while Binet and Field have consistently shown that long-term brand investment drives stronger commercial growth than focusing only on demand capture.
The media that gets undervalued
This is where premium media is often judged unfairly.
Its job isn't simply to capture demand. It builds trust, consideration and preference long before consumers are ready to buy. Those effects influence future sales, but they rarely appear neatly inside a short-term optimisation dashboard.
Research from The Trade Desk and PA Consulting found premium advertising environments are 4.3 times more effective at driving purchase consideration than lower-quality placements and can increase purchase intent by 37%. Yet those outcomes are rarely the metrics that determine next quarter's budget.
Instead, premium media is often compared against channels designed to harvest existing demand. A viewer may watch a CTV campaign today, search weeks later, then convert through another channel that receives all the credit.
The advertising created the demand. The measurement credited someone else.
That gap is becoming harder to ignore. IAB research finds that 60–75% of marketers lack confidence in the rigour, speed and reliability of current measurement approaches. In Australia, two-thirds of the industry are now using or exploring marketing mix modelling. The reason is simple: flawed measurement leads to flawed investment.
Mars Australia demonstrated what better measurement looks like. After applying marketing mix modelling to its confectionery business, the company identified opportunities to improve the effectiveness of its online video investment. By reallocating spend based on business outcomes rather than platform metrics, Mars reportedly doubled ROI on that channel, demonstrating how independent measurement can lead to better investment decisions.
The lesson wasn't that the media plan needed another metric. It needed measurement connected to business growth.
Measure growth, not compliments
With FY27 budgets still settling, marketers should ask a harder question of every investment: what growth is this actually meant to deliver — incremental sales, market share, new customers, repeat purchase or higher-value customers? The answer should shape not only how success is defined, but how it is measured.
That means looking beyond platform reporting to approaches such as incrementality testing, marketing mix modelling and cross-channel measurement. These methods require more discipline than an overnight dashboard, but they are far better at answering the question that matters: what changed because of the advertising?
Just as importantly, the measurement itself needs to be independent. No media owner should be the sole judge of its own effectiveness. A closed platform measuring its own inventory is unlikely to tell a marketer that those dollars could work harder somewhere else.
A buy-side platform that owns no inventory has no such conflict: it has no environment to favour, and no reason to keep budget anywhere it isn’t working. To compare a walled garden's reported performance with the contribution of premium media, measurement needs to be objective, consistent and applied across channels in the same way.
That matters because a campaign can hit its reach target, beat its CPM benchmark and deliver an impressive ROAS while contributing very little incremental growth. If media buyers continue rewarding the metrics that look best on the surface and without deep interrogation, budgets will keep flowing to the media that is easiest to measure rather than the media that creates the greatest business value.
The next measurement challenge is not simply to make reporting more accurate. It is to make investment decisions more accountable.
While the FY27 budget is still moving, define what growth actually means for the business. Then measure what contributes to it over the short and long term and invest accordingly.
Everything else is just a compliment.