This Media Measurement Firm Has a Plan to Fix Hollywood’s ‘Broken’ Metric System: A New Competitive Fault Line

Ebiquity and the World Federation of Advertisers have released the Paid Media Effectiveness Handbook, proposing a more connected approach to advertising measurement after their research found that multinational marketers possess extensive analytical capabilities but often fail to translate the results into budget decisions. The development provides a concrete identity and program behind the broader concern that media measurement is not functioning effectively for advertisers.

The research covered 71 senior leaders across 10 sectors and included in-depth interviews with 27 executives at major multinational advertisers collectively responsible for $40 billion in annual advertising spending. Eight in 10 advertisers already conduct marketing mix modeling and brand-lift studies, but only 15% of surveyed leaders said effectiveness findings are the primary driver of budget decisions. No participating company described its measurement capability as best in class.

Ebiquity CEO Ruben Schreurs said marketers have invested heavily in measurement tools to satisfy growing demands for accountability, yet still struggle to make timely decisions and evaluate the appropriate outcomes. The study found that only 14% of organizations reported full agreement between marketing and finance over what effectiveness means. Evaluation also remained weighted toward media-delivery indicators rather than commercial measures such as net profit, which was used by 17%.

The research identified fragmented data, expanding channels and slow reporting as major obstacles. Forty-six percent of organizations were at the lowest maturity levels for integrating data into a unified view, while more than 60% rated platform “walled gardens” as a severe or critical problem. Fifty-four percent said insights arrive too late to influence decisions. Retail media, connected television, influencer marketing and AI-generated search were among the channels described as advancing faster than the systems designed to measure them.

The handbook is intended to help advertisers combine multiple evidence sources, establish governance and create rules for resolving situations in which methodologies, metrics and dashboards point toward different actions. PepsiCo’s Sorin Patilinet emphasized the difficulty of turning measurement into business decisions, while Pandora marketing effectiveness manager Kasper Madsen questioned the value of analysis that remains retrospective and cannot guide near-term action.

ConsumerEXP analysis: Ebiquity’s proposed remedy creates a competitive fault line between vendors offering additional datasets and those offering systems that connect measurement directly to financial planning. For entertainment companies and advertisers buying television, streaming and creator media, the significant change is not another audience metric, but an attempt to make evidence consistently determine spending decisions.