Marketing organizations have spent the past several years building out measurement stacks: marketing mix models, brand lift studies, multi touch attribution, incrementality testing. New research from the World Federation of Advertisers and Ebiquity finds that stack has not solved the problem it was built to solve. Two thirds of brand owners say they are behind on paid media measurement, and only 15% say effectiveness evidence is actually what drives their budget decisions.
The Tools Improved. The Decisions Didn’t.
The WFA and Ebiquity study surveyed 71 senior marketing leaders across 10 sectors globally, backed by in depth interviews with 25 leaders at multinational advertisers representing a combined $40 billion in annual ad spend. The headline finding is not that marketers lack tools. It is that the tools have stopped translating into faster, more confident calls. Eighty percent of advertisers already run marketing mix modelling and brand lift studies, yet just 13% rate themselves strong on the speed of turning that data into an insight, and fewer than 3% are fully confident they can separate short term sales performance from long term brand building impact.
Sorin Patilinet, who leads global marketing effectiveness and growth strategy innovation at PepsiCo, put it plainly in the research: “The tools are there, the discipline is there, the coverage is there. Where marketers still struggle is to turn all those measurements into decisions.” Kasper Madsen, marketing effectiveness manager at Pandora, framed the same gap from the practitioner side: “If you’re not able to act upon it, what’s the point? Measurement can very often be retrospective.”
Where the Data Breaks Down
Three structural problems recur across the interviews. The first is integration: 46% of organizations sit at the lowest maturity levels for pulling disparate data sources into one usable view, which means analysts are still stitching together spreadsheets and dashboards before they can even start answering a question. The second is platform opacity: more than 60% of respondents rate walled gardens, the closed ad ecosystems run by the largest platforms, as a severe or critical challenge to getting a clean read on what is actually working. The third is speed: 54% of leaders say insights arrive too late to influence the decision they were meant to inform.
That combination produces an odd result. Marketers are not short on measurement output, they are short on measurement that arrives fast enough, in a clean enough form, to change a decision before the budget is already spent. Tom Ashby, the WFA’s global lead for media services, ties this back to organizational design rather than tooling: “Organisations that lead on effectiveness are not necessarily those with most sophisticated tools.” Ebiquity group chief executive Ruben Schreurs frames the stakes in dollar terms, noting that paid media is a $1.15 trillion industry where “too much investment is still allocated based on vanity metrics.”
Finance and Marketing Are Still Not Reading From the Same Page
The research also surfaces a persistent alignment gap between marketing and finance functions. Just 14% of the multinational advertisers interviewed say marketing and finance are aligned on how “effectiveness” is even defined, let alone measured. Without a shared definition, a marketing team’s case for reinvesting in a channel and a finance team’s read on the same spend can point in opposite directions, and the tie usually goes to whichever number is easier to defend in a budget meeting.
That is part of why 75% of the leaders surveyed expect more than half of their budget decisions to be measurement led within three years, even though only 15% say that is true today. The gap between where organizations expect to be and where they actually are is the clearest signal in the research: measurement maturity is being treated as a destination companies are racing toward, not a system that is already running.
What It Means for the Marketing Leader
The practical takeaway is not to buy another attribution platform. It is to audit whether the outputs from the tools already in place are reaching a decision maker in time to matter, and in a form that finance will accept without a separate argument over methodology. That means mapping which decisions actually depend on measurement (channel mix, campaign pacing, renewal negotiations with a platform) and working backward from the cadence those decisions run on, rather than the cadence a dashboard happens to refresh on.
It also means treating walled garden opacity as a negotiating issue, not just a technical one. If more than 60% of leaders call platform data access a severe challenge, that is a data access clause worth raising directly with ad platform reps and measurement vendors building pre-campaign attention metrics, rather than something analytics teams quietly work around after the fact. The same discipline applies to the trust layer underneath the numbers: as ad verification vendors extend coverage into AI powered ad placements, the measurement stack marketers are relying on is itself changing shape, which makes an internal audit of what is actually being measured, and why, more urgent rather than less.
The Fix Is Organizational Before It Is Technical
WFA and Ebiquity’s response to their own findings is a joint publication, the Paid Media Effectiveness Handbook, built for WFA member organizations. Its central argument is that no single measurement methodology (mix modelling, multi touch attribution, incrementality testing) answers every question on its own, and that the leaders who get ahead will be the ones who build connected systems with explicit decision rules for what to do when two methodologies disagree, rather than defaulting to whichever number arrived first.
For a marketing leader evaluating their own stack this quarter, the research points to three concrete moves: pressure test whether current outputs actually change a decision or simply confirm one already made, set an explicit rule with finance for resolving disagreements between methodologies before the next big budget review, and treat data integration debt as a budget line rather than a background IT project. The tools are not the bottleneck anymore. The system connecting them to a decision is.
Source: World Federation of Advertisers
