At this year’s Future of TV Advertising Sydney, one message echoed across the room: advertising must be accountable to business outcomes. It’s a familiar call, but the real question now is why we still aren’t measuring and optimising for outcomes at scale.

The reason? We’ve been waiting for a perfect solution. And in the meantime, the systems and incentives we rely on continue to reward what’s easiest to count, not what counts. The pursuit of perfection mixed with legacy behaviour is costing the TV ecosystem and, more importantly, advertisers, everything.

The real cost of reach-first planning

In 2024, Adgile ran a cross-screen econometric study of $180m in cross-platform screens spend, across six brand categories over 2.5 years. The primary purpose was to assess whether budget allocations by channel, informed mostly by reach-based planning, were costing marketers business outcome volume like website conversions and instore sales revenue.

Screens-motivated business outcome volume index – historical vs potential

The study found that screens spend, if optimised at a channel level by business outcomes first, had an opportunity to generate an average 45% more business outcome volume than actual historical performance.

Why reach ≠ outcomes: the attribute mismatch holding TV advertising back

In 2023, Adgile conducted what it believes to be the largest and most representative streaming platform campaign analysis in Australia to date. The purpose: identify media placement and creative attributes most likely to convert audiences. The study covered $100 million in VOD investment across 60 brands and 1.3 billion impressions over 18 months. It found that over 80% of impressions significantly underperformed compared to their higher-performing counterparts:

Actual vs simulated investment outcomes from $100 million in VOD campaigns

Using simulated investment modelling, we asked: what if those suboptimal impressions had followed the same placement and creative patterns as the top performers? The answer: the campaign pool could have delivered 69 per cent more business outcome volume than it actually did.

Oxford University’s Felipe Thomaz framed the challenge perfectly in Mi3’s podcast: reach is still treated as the industry’s universal benchmark, despite overwhelming evidence that not all reach is created equal.

Adgile sees it in its own data. In a separate 2025 study, Adgile analysed 10 reach-led campaigns to compare two things: the rate of exclusive reach and the rate of business outcome volume, each per 1,000 impressions, across a range of planning and buying dimensions. The result? A persistent mismatch across dimensions like region, day of week, daypart and platform.

Exclusive reach rate vs business outcome volume rate – by daypart

Take dayparting, for example. As can be seen above, dayparts like Midnight Till Dawn and Morning were more efficient at building reach than driving business outcomes. In contrast, Early and Late Peak performed far better on outcome delivery.

In short: what works for reach doesn’t necessarily work for results.

And this isn’t just directional. The coefficient of variation for business outcome volume across placements was 89 per cent, compared to only 16 per cent for reach. Translation: generating reach is easier and more consistent. Generating business outcomes? More complex, but far more rewarding when done right.

The inconvenient truth: the need for imperfect outcomes-led measurement

It’s time to accept a counter-intuitive truth: the market doesn’t need the perfect measurement solution we’ve spent years talking about. It needs an imperfect one and fast.

Why? Because marketers today are operating in an environment shaped by the major walled garden platforms that offer imperfect but immediate, always-on, outcomes-based reporting. And while premium TV has fallen behind in that race, marketers’ need for agility in demonstrating positive impact from investment isn’t diminishing.

At the same time, the long-term effects of TV continue to be reaffirmed. As Thinkbox’s latest Profit Ability 2 research demonstrated, TV delivers unmatched long-term profit payback. But therein lies the paradox: its full value often isn’t realised before the next media budget allocation cycle. A victim of its own success, TVs lack of a short-term view ironically makes it harder to defend its long-term strength, costing it budget share and costing advertisers growth.

Full advertising profit driven by channel

So, what do we do? We embrace the imperfect. We acknowledge that real-time outcomes measurement cannot capture the totality of TV’s long-term effects. But it doesn’t have to. Its purpose is different: to stop budget leakage to platforms that offer speed over substance – and to maintain advertiser confidence in premium channels by showing performance now.

This doesn’t replace long-term models like MMM. It doesn’t replace audience delivery metrics from OzTAM, Kantar or digital platform tools. It fills the urgent gap: real-time outcomes-based accountability.

Without it, we’re leaving the door open for outcome-hungry marketers to redirect spend away from channels that actually work. And when that happens, both the TV ecosystem and advertisers lose.

As Craig Service from Adgile said on stage at the Future of TV Advertising, marketers deserve better. Better doesn’t have to mean perfect. Better means available, accountable and actionable now.

A balanced outcomes framework that works

The future of measurement isn’t a single solution. It’s a two-tiered framework.

Tier one is long-term planning for business outcomes, informed by robust, cross-channel models like Marketing Mix Modelling. These directional approaches are typically conducted at key planning periods, helping marketers allocate investment across channels and timeframes. They’re the guardrails for brand growth.

TV/streaming outcomes measurement framework

Tier two is real-time optimisation for business outcomes, typically powered by refreshed-daily in-channel attribution models using log-level data. While tier one tells you where to invest at the macro level, tier two guides your investment decisions more granularly mid-flight, enabling smarter media and creative decisions: pause, adjust, increase, swap. It ensures every dollar works harder while campaigns are live.

This isn’t theory. It’s a scalable solution that exists today, giving marketers and agencies the evidence they need to demonstrate performance and optimise now, not after the next budget cycle, when TV may have already lost more ground.

Together, these two outcome-led tiers – long-term measurement and real-time optimisation – offer a future-fit framework that balances what marketers need to succeed for the future with what they need to know now.

What Adgile has learned from applying this framework: category contexts are key

The marketing industry has long relied on empirical generalisations to guide decision-making in the absence of perfect data. Think:

• Excess Share of Voice (SOV > SOM) drives growth
• Brands grow by reaching both in-market and out-of-market buyers
• The 60/40 split for balancing brand building and sales activation
• 1+ Reach is essential for mental availability.

These are useful heuristics. But when misinterpreted as they often are, they can lead to oversimplified strategies that limit growth. Even Binet and Field have acknowledged that 60/40 split, for instance, varies by things like brand maturity, competitive context and more. As Professor Mark Ritson put it of The Long and The Short of It, it’s “a metaphor to guide good marketing and not a reality in and of itself.”

And so if empirical generalisations are better considered directional and, for some, aspirational, at Adgile, our outcomes data has shown that measuring contextual nuance per brand and its associated category is where the real opportunity lies. There are two types of context we measure in real time:

1. Contexts you can control (e.g. media platform, creative length, program genre). In the case below, we found that established brand creative executions were found to require lower frequencies than new brand creative to drive results – a “wear-in” effect:

Campaign performance of ‘old’ versus ‘new’ brand creative by average weekly frequency

This output from real time measurement guided the advertiser to reduce their weekly frequency as creative for the new brand platform wore in over time.

1. Contexts you can control for (e.g. brand size, purchase cycle, competitor intensity). For example, smaller brands in category often benefit more from segmented targeting, while larger brands in category favour broad reach:

Index of performance by brand size (SOV as proxy) in category and breadth of targeting

Compared to Adgile’s benchmark data for larger brands, the smaller brand’s results have tended to support a shift back to segmented targeting. This challenges the blanket application of empirical generalisations without considering contexts like brand scale.

The takeaway: outcomes-led measurement and optimisation are most effective when adapting to both the levers you can pull and the category-specific conditions you must navigate, making real-time optimisation smarter, not just faster.

If the TV ecosystem doesn’t embrace real time measurement now, everyone loses

Streaming and Linear TV shouldn’t be losing ground to platforms delivering weaker outcomes. But they are, because those platforms offer real-time outcomes reporting and TV hasn’t at scale. Until now.

The solution to stop this slide exists. If we don’t act – if we don’t implement real-time outcomes measurement at scale – we will continue to see dollars drain from one of the most effective advertising channels ever built. And that hurts everyone: publishers, agencies and especially advertisers.

We need to stop defending the old ways. Imperfect outcomes measurement is better than no measurement at all. And real-time outcomes – even if limited to the short term – are the essential bridge to long-term impact.

Let's build better, together

The capability exists today and advertisers, agencies and media owners must come together to reframe success around business outcomes, not just buying efficiencies.

That means creating shared frameworks. It means collaborating with trade associations like OzTAM and the IAB and emerging think tanks like the Video Futures Collective. And it means embracing real-time measurement, not because it’s perfect, but because it’s necessary.

As Felipe Thomaz said in Mi3’s podcast, “If you're eating low-hanging fruit and everyone else is eating off the floor, you're golden.”

It’s time to move forward. Not by waiting. But by building.