This year, we had the chance to join a pretty special panel at the Data Collaboration Summit. The topic was “Mind the Gap: Tackling Measurement and Effectiveness in Marketing,” which is basically everything we care about in one sentence.
The panel brought together four different viewpoints:
- Paul Wright from Uber Advertising
- Nadine Warren from ITV
- Sorin Patilinet from PepsiCo
- Ramla Jarrar from MASS Analytics
The room was full, the mics were being passed around, and right from the intro you could feel how much the industry is shifting. Everyone talks about data, but what the panel really showed is that measurement is starting to hit a new level of complexity and urgency.
What we all agreed on
Across brands, platforms, broadcasters and analytics teams, the same themes kept coming up:
Attention is becoming a real metric.
Not just reach, not impressions, but whether people genuinely notice and take something in. Paul shared how Uber is measuring actual eye engagement during a ride and tying it back to real outcomes. It was impressive to see how “quiet attention” in a ride or food-delivery moment can lift brand impact.
TV is evolving fast.
Nadine talked about ITV’s clean room partnerships and how broadcasters are working to make TV more measurable for brands, especially when advertisers expect near real-time results. Project Lantern, a joint effort across ITV, Sky, Channel 4 and Thinkbox, might finally close the gap between TV exposure and digital response. That’s a big deal.
Retail media is exploding, but measurement is messy.
Sorin said it bluntly. Retail media is stealing budget from both paid media and trade, but brands still struggle to understand if it builds brands or just pushes short-term sales.
And on our side, Ramla talked about the core issues we see every day in MMM:
- every retailer measures differently
- results lack transparency
- the data is usually too bundled to measure properly
- incrementality is rarely clear
Everyone is excited about retail media, but no one wants to invest blindly forever.
Ramla’s take on MMM
Our co-founder Dr Ramla Jarrar emphasised that there is no single source of truth in measurement. Not MMM, not attribution, not experiments.
Instead of fighting over “the best method,” the future is combining them.
- use experiments when they exist and calibrate MMM
- take the good parts of attribution
- use MMM to keep everything consistent at a business level
The best results we deliver are always when a client shares experiment outcomes with us and we layer them into the models. When that happens, decisions actually speed up and brands stop arguing about whose numbers are “right.”
Why this event mattered to us
The whole day was about collaboration. Competitors sharing data, retailers opening black boxes, broadcasters testing joint measurement, and advertisers challenging everyone to be more transparent.
This is the real shift.
If you want to dig into this topic
We’ve been working on a lot of MMM projects that combine incrementality, retail media and attention data. If this is something you’re exploring, contact us here.
