The marketing industry has a measurement problem. Despite billions invested into campaigns across digital, in-store, retail media, experiential activations, and traditional channels, many brands still struggle to answer a basic question. Which investments actually drive incremental sales?
“I felt like I could never be a good media salesperson without really understanding how the programs we were running actually drove incremental sales,” says Cristina Anne Costa, Senior Vice President of Sales at Pēq. Costa has spent much of her career at the convergence of media, data, and shopper marketing. Working closely with analytics and measurement teams while leading commercial strategy, she’s seen how fragmented measurement frameworks make it difficult for brands to evaluate marketing performance. The challenge is not a lack of data but the absence of standardized measurement that allows organizations to compare marketing activity across channels and investments with clarity.
The Industry’s Measurement Problem
From her years working with brands across the consumer packaged goods (CPG) and beverage alcohol sectors, Costa has seen how frequently marketers rely on multiple measurement providers, each using different methodologies and datasets. Campaigns may be evaluated using various attribution models, retailer reports, and platform analytics. While each source offers insights, they rarely align into a cohesive view of performance.
“There are so many different partners out there that measure incremental sales,” she says. “They all have different methodologies and different data sources. When you’re trying to determine if a campaign actually worked, it becomes incredibly challenging.”
Another complication is that many measurement systems are not neutral. Platforms frequently evaluate performance using their own internal data, which can create conflicts of interest. “A lot of partners are grading their own homework,” Costa says. “It’s important to have a neutral, unbiased third party that can complement existing measurement and help create a true single source of truth.”
Standardization becomes critical in this environment. Without it, brands cannot reliably compare campaigns, channels, or marketing investments. “The goal is to measure everything with a standardized approach so marketers can compare their marketing apples to apples,” Costa explains.
Measuring the Full Marketing Mix
One of the biggest barriers to standardization is technical. Many legacy measurement systems rely on device identifiers and browser cookies, signals that are rapidly disappearing due to privacy regulations and technology changes. “A lot of measurement today can only measure digital channels,” she says. “But marketing doesn’t only happen in digital.”
A comprehensive view of incremental sales requires measurement across the full marketing mix, which isn’t always easy given how diverse modern marketing activity has become. That includes retail media, influencer campaigns, paid search, in-store displays, experiential marketing, promotions, and traditional advertising. “You might want to measure how in-store displays drive incremental sales, or whether a pricing promotion influenced purchase behavior,” she says. “You might even want to understand the impact of something like a drone show at a music festival.” Capturing those effects requires measurement models that can integrate data across digital and non-digital environments without relying on cookies. It also requires infrastructure that complies with evolving global privacy regulations.
Turning Measurement Into Actionable Intelligence
Even when brands do measure campaigns, results often arrive too late to influence decision-making. Traditional measurement studies frequently involve attribution windows and reporting cycles that deliver insights weeks after campaigns end. This lag is a fundamental limitation. “Most measurement today is post-campaign,” she says. “You run your campaign, wait for the attribution window, and then maybe a month later you get the results.” Delays like that prevent marketers from adjusting campaigns while they are still running.
Measurement must function more like a real-time decision platform. When marketers can see performance continuously, they can optimize investments during the campaign rather than after it ends. Real-time visibility also transforms internal conversations within organizations. Marketing leaders often need to justify budgets to finance teams or explain the impact of spending decisions.
“Marketers need to be able to go to their CFO and show what happens if a million dollars is removed from the budget,” she says. “Or where the next marketing dollar should go to drive incremental sales.” With predictive modeling and forecasting tools, marketing teams can demonstrate the projected impact of both budget increases and budget reductions based on marginal ROI.
Why Standardization Matters for the Future of Marketing
The urgency around measurement is only increasing as artificial intelligence (AI) reshapes how consumers discover and evaluate brands. Costa believes marketers must prepare for the influence of large language models and agentic commerce systems that will increasingly mediate purchasing decisions. “LLMs naturally favor content,” she says. “Brands that have more information and content available will have a greater chance of being included in a search query when a LLM system returns only three or four options vs. pages of indexed search results.”
This dynamic could rebalance the industry after years of heavy investment in performance marketing, and Costa expects a shift toward a more balanced approach that blends conversion-focused tactics with stronger brand storytelling and content development. “The pendulum moved heavily toward performance marketing,” she says. “AI may start to move it back toward the middle because brand content will matter more.”
Regardless of channel shifts, marketers must be able to measure outcomes consistently across every marketing activity. Standardized incremental sales measurement provides the foundation for that visibility. Without it, organizations risk making strategic decisions based on incomplete or inconsistent data.
“For the first time, marketers have tools that allow them to understand where to not only see how their marketing has been performing in real time, but where to put the next marketing dollar,” she says. “That allows marketing to be seen as a driver of growth rather than just a required expense.”
Follow Cristina Anne Costa on LinkedIn for more insights.
