Brands Like Nestlé, Haleon, and Molson Coors Wrestle With Broken Measurement

Measuring the efficacy of ad spend continues to be one of the thorniest issues marketers face, and the frustrations bubbled up across multiple sessions during ADWEEK House at the Possible conference in Miami.

During a session about measuring incrementality—or how much an ad campaign contributed to sales, above and beyond what would have happened anyway—Sandra Abla, director of brand marketing strategy at CAVA, noted the tricky situation marketers often face.

“As a brand marketer, you want everything to work, and if it doesn’t, you have to explain why,” said Abla. “But explaining that can be really difficult.”

One problem is that marketers have been trying to measure incrementality for decades, and there just aren’t great solutions, said Nicole Lesinski, director of ecommerce strategy at Nestlé. 

If there’s a reason to be optimistic, it’s that AI has made it faster to pull insights, which provides a path to improve incrementality measurement. If anything, the rise of AI means it’s time for brands to refocus their efforts on figuring out the incrementality puzzle, said Marissa Solan, U.S. director of earned and social media at Haleon, whose brands include Advil, Theraflu, and TUMS.

But how can a marketer measure something as complex as incrementality when it’s even tricky to measure something that should theoretically be simpler—like whether their CTV showed up where they were supposed to?

During a separate ADWEEK House session about CTV buying, Anna Johnson, director of precision media and marketing at Molson Coors, said that even with a well-planned CTV buy, algorithms can pull spend toward wherever inventory is easiest to scale, usually in the palms of a few dominant players. The only way to keep the plan on track is through human oversight.

Even though the marketing industry runs on data, its practitioners ironically still have a hard time figuring out what worked—in large part because the ecosystem’s fragmentation is stacked against them.