Oxford University Associate Professor Felipe Thomaz last year created a disturbance in the metrics for decades underpinning the media business. Planning media campaigns on blunt audience reach numbers alone, per his analysis of 1,000 campaigns via Wavemaker and Kantar, delivers "really mediocre outcomes". As the TV industry aligns on a plan to build a real-time outcomes platform to help stem the flow of dollars to three big walled gardens, Thomaz has reservations about trying to compare TV on performance marketing metrics. “That worries me ... We know from decades of existing research that the long-term impact of advertising is twice the short-term impact of advertising," he says. But that doesn’t mean industry shouldn’t build it. "It's definitely the right path, and we can do this," per Thomaz, "but we cannot stop there." More broadly – i.e. across all channels – he thinks agencies are best placed to crack the ads-to-outcomes code. He and colleagues have literally written that code – and Thomaz urges them to "steal it and run."