The media planning agency review process can be laborious and expensive for both marketers and agencies. Clarity, transparency, and communication can help. Table of Contents: Establish clear business goals Write a brief that attracts the best media agency for you Step 1: Establish clear business goals Reviews are expensive on both sides of the table. In a 2023 ANA/4As study, marketers spent an average of $408,500 out of pocket to run one, and incumbents spent about $406,000 defending their business. With three agencies pitching, the total tops $1 million. Yet two-thirds of marketers kept their incumbent anyway, which is why the 4As says a review “should really be considered a last resort.” The trade groups’ new Positive Pitch Principles suggest asking yourself two questions before you start: Has your incumbent heard specifically what’s falling short, and had a fair chance to fix it? And if you can’t yet describe the partner you need, hold the review until you can. In our experience, frustration that looks like an agency problem often traces back to structure: Scope: Has the work outgrown what the contract and team were built for? Compensation: Does the fee model reward the outcomes you care about today? Governance: Do performance check-ins match how fast your business moves? Decision rights: Who approves plans, and how many layers must a change clear? This hits media planning agencies hardest. ANA/4As research puts the average media-only relationship at 3.7 years, roughly half the 7.3 years full-service partnerships last. And that radical candor runs both ways. Agencies, too, should say openly when a scope of work has drifted past their core expertise or approvals are stalling the work, instead of quietly absorbing it. That’s the standard we hold ourselves to at Exverus. 1a. Decide what needs an outside partner Start by deciding which media functions could be done internally vs. those that need an outside partner at all. Our guide to hiring an agency vs. buying in-house walks you through that decision-making process. 1b. Before you RFP, identify your ideal media planning agency partner Pitch consultancy ID Comms puts it bluntly: “your success will be decided long before any RFP goes out.” For larger advertisers, its recommended runway is five to six quarters, and most of that time goes to internal work, such as: auditing contracts identifying business objectives designing the operating model you want ...and only then sketching the partner who fits it. The ANA and 4As reach the same conclusion in their 10 Positive Pitch Principles, which ask marketers to open any review by stating why the search exists and what business outcomes will define success. Name the objective as precisely as you can. Brands often come to us wanting “more awareness” or “more sales,” and sometimes they ask for awareness when they really want sales. Those are reasonable starting points, but neither tells an agency what to build. “Win back lapsed buyers in our top three retail accounts” does. The sharper the objective, the better we can judge how to meet it, and whether we’re the right partner for the job. None of this works unless you’re candid internally first. Put your real budget in writing, list what you’ve already tested, and acknowledge where internal politics shaped past plans. ID Comms warns that misalignment among marketing, procurement, and finance shows up fast in the questions agencies send back. Exverus Cofounder Talia Arnold discusses our ideal kinds of clients, what makes a successful brand/agency partnership, and how we keep winning brands over. Agencies owe you the same honesty. At Exverus, we always check a prospect’s needs and budget against our core strengths, and sit the pitch out if those don’t line up. Action Items: Put the problem in writing to your incumbent. Name what’s underperforming and set a timeline to fix it before you consider a review. Run the structural check first. Score scope, compensation, governance, and decision rights before you score your agency. Ask your agency where your setup slows them down. Approval bottlenecks and scope creep rarely surface until someone asks directly. Audit before you brief. Document your budget, your current partners, and stakeholder disagreements so agencies respond to your unique situation. Write the objective in one sentence. Name the audience, the behavior you want to change, and the metric that proves it moved. Ask every potential agency what it doesn't offer. An honest answer about what it can't solve tells you more than a polished capabilities deck. Step 2: Write a brief that attracts the best media agency for you When undergoing an agency review, your brief is your biggest lever. It decides which agencies raise their hands and who they send. Most briefs leave agencies guessing. In Campaign’s first U.S. State of the Pitch report, only 13% of agencies said they went in with a very clear understanding of scope and budget. When a brief leaves out the budget range, whether the incumbent is pitching, or the category experience you need, agencies fill the gaps with guesses. You get vague, padded pitches back. The ANA and 4As’ Positive Pitch Principles spell out what belongs in the brief: why you’re reviewing the outcomes and KPIs you’ll score against an expected budget range, and whether the incumbent is participating. If you run a hybrid model, add one more section: what stays in-house. Our agency vs. in-house guide recommends settling who owns platform accounts, reporting, and measurement before you divide the work. But don't over-bloat the brief with AI slop! Digiday reports agencies receiving hundred-page, jargon-filled briefs that waste time and signal laziness. Then, keep the field tight: 8 to 12 agencies at the RFP stage and 3 to 4 finalists. Timing counts, too. In a Campaign roundup of holiday pitch stories, one agency said it turns down reviews that would require work over the break. A brief that lands in mid-December competes with every agency’s year-end, and the best teams may simply pass. And fit runs both ways. The same principles say an agency whose capabilities don’t match your needs and budget should consider declining. An agency that tells you early where it fits, and where it doesn’t, is a good sign. Action Items: Put the numbers in the brief. A budget range, KPIs, and the incumbent’s status turn generic pitches into specific ones. Name what’s changing. If your audience, competitive set, or success metric is shifting, say so on page one. Plan around the holidays. Send your brief by mid-November or hold it until January, so the A-team can actually show up. More to come on the pitch process soon! Subscribe to our weekly Paid Media Insights newsletter for the latest. About the Author Talia Arnold is the Co-Founder and Managing Partner of Exverus by Brainlabs, an independent, full-funnel media agency serving both challenger brands and Fortune 500s. With 2​2 years in advertising, media planning, and entrepreneurship, Talia was named a 2026 ADWEEK Agent of Change and a 2025 CampaignUS Inspiring Women in Media. Now under the Brainlabs umbrella, Exverus joins a global team of 1000+ leading the industry with its technological innovations and visionary culture. AI Disclosure: We use AI models to efficiently consolidate information from the most trusted industry sources and combine it with our real-world expertise. Every word drafted is carefully reviewed, edited, and confirmed by human eyes and hands for accuracy and quality. All information on exverus.com has been executive-approved and is updated daily.

Learn what brand lift studies cost, how many survey responses you need, how to measure ad exposure across channels, and how to tie results to growth. Key Takeaways A brand lift study measures how an ad campaign changes brand metrics such as awareness, favorability, consideration, and purchase intent by comparing survey responses from people who saw the ads (the test group) with a similar group who didn’t (the control group). Google, Meta, LinkedIn, and Amazon Ads offer brand lift studies at no added cost to campaigns that meet minimum spend thresholds. Independent cross-channel studies from research partners like Nielsen, Kantar, and DISQO typically cost from about $30,000 to more than $150,000. Platform-run brand lift studies can’t account for people who saw the same campaign on other channels, so multichannel campaigns often need a third-party study to measure incremental lift across all media. Brand lift results become evidence of business growth when they’re paired with customer acquisition cost (CAC), marketing mix modeling, and loyalty indicators like retention and referrals. Table of Contents The challenge of tracking brand health What are brand lift studies? How much does a brand lift study cost? How large does my brand lift study sample size need to be for reliable results? How do I measure ad exposure across channels? How do I connect brand lift metrics to business outcomes? The challenge of tracking brand health We’ve all moved past the tired brand vs. performance debate, and most marketers now accept that brand strength drives sustained business growth. The harder question is how to measure what upper-funnel paid media actually does for your brand. Common brand health metrics include awareness, favorability, perceived quality, and advocacy. These metrics are hard to measure because they rely on either direct consumer feedback (surveys, panels, and focus groups) or indirect behavioral signals like branded search volume and social listening. Neither method is perfect, and neither shows whether your media caused the change. That’s why Exverus by Brainlabs takes a scientific approach to brand measurement with brand lift studies. Exverus is an official Agency Partner of Tracksuit, a brand health tracking platform which saves our clients money and gives them a competitive edge. Click to learn more! What are brand lift studies? A brand lift study measures an advertising campaign's impact on brand awareness and favorability using a test-and-control methodology, comparing a test group (people exposed to the ads) against a control group (people not exposed to the ads but otherwise similar). This approach offers significant advantages: It controls for external factors that might impact brand perception, such as negative press or viral content Unlike brand search trends or social listening, it specifically accounts for media exposure, allowing us to isolate the impact of marketing campaigns How much does a brand lift study cost? A brand lift study costs nothing beyond your media spend on platforms like YouTube, Meta, LinkedIn, and Amazon Ads, as long as your campaign meets the platform’s minimum spend. Independent studies from research partners like Nielsen, Kantar, or DISQO run from about $30,000 for a simple digital-only study to more than $150,000 for a complex multichannel study. Google Ads, Amazon Ads, and Meta offer free brand lift studies to advertisers who meet minimum spend and impression thresholds, which ensure enough data for a statistically significant result. In the US, YouTube brand lift studies require at least $10,000 in campaign budget over a 10-day period to measure one brand metric, and the minimum rises with each additional question. Minimums vary by country. LinkedIn Ads offers Brand Lift Tests at no added cost to accounts that meet a minimum cumulative budget (historically about $90,000 in the US). Campaign Manager calculates the exact requirement based on your test dates and number of brand metrics. The main disadvantage of platform-run studies: they can’t account for people who saw your campaign on other channels, and that exposure can contaminate results. Research partners like Nielsen, DISQO, or Kantar can measure incremental brand lift across many media channels holistically (CTV, digital audio, out-of-home, radio, you name it!). This gives your team a more complete picture of how ad exposure connects with real-life consumer sentiment. Studies for online channels, where ads can be tagged, usually cost less. Offline channels such as TV and out-of-home are more expensive to measure. Long campaign flights, interim reports, online dashboards, and the larger samples needed to break out results in more detail all add to the cost of a study. How large does my brand lift study sample size need to be for reliable results? This question is complicated because the answer can vary so widely and depend upon many considerations. We’ve seen sample sizes as low as 30, but Google says YouTube brand lift studies may begin detecting lift at around 2,000 survey responses per metric, and should detect it at about 5,600 responses per metric at its recommended budget minimum. If you need multiple breakouts, such as by audiences or creatives, you'll need a large overall sample size to have enough data for each. Source: Google DV360 Help How do I measure ad exposure across channels? Tracking ad exposure typically involves placing pixels on creative assets to digitally monitor viewership. However, this approach isn't feasible across all channels: Many social media platforms restrict this tracking capability Traditional channels like TV, radio, and out-of-home don't support digital tracking The common alternative is an opportunity to see (OTS) methodology, where survey respondents' reported media consumption is matched against media placement timing. In our experience, OTS works well for certain channels like TV or radio but yields inconsistent results for others like social media. The methodology assumes test and control groups are identical except for ad exposure. We attempt to ensure this through sample matching based on demographics, geography, or online behaviors—but no two samples are 100% alike! The goal is similarity, not perfection. And beware of cross-channel contamination: Modern consumers fluidly move between mobile, video, and TV multiple times daily, making channel-level impact testing challenging. When we're trying to compare ad-exposed versus non-exposed individuals, channel-level brand impact testing can be contaminated with other ad exposures. How do I connect brand lift metrics to business outcomes? Mid-funnel metrics like web traffic, customer acquisition rates, and customer acquisition cost (CAC). The more you invest in your brand, the lower your CAC should be. Marketing mix modeling (or media mix modeling) aggregates many sources of data to provide a comprehensive, full-funnel understanding of how different marketing channels contribute to overall business growth. AI-powered predictive analytics tools model different scenarios to help us choose the right course. Loyalty indicators like customer retention, online reviews, referrals, and consistent price premium. Your brand is strong if consumers think of you long after they've made a first purchase. Learn how MMM, multi-touch attribution, and incrementality serve different, but equally necessary, media measurement purposes. For more media buying tips, agency news, and case studies, subscribe to our weekly Paid Media Insights newsletter.

Learn how to pick markets, measure incrementality, and use search, DOOH, CTV, and retail media to drive local sales with hyperlocal advertising. Key Takeaways Local is where trust still lives. In an October 2025 Pew Research Center survey, 70% of U.S. adults said they trust information from local news organizations, compared with 56% for national news organizations, which gives brands that localize their messaging and placements a credibility advantage that national-only campaigns don't get. AI has made local visibility a media prerequisite. BrightLocal's 2026 Local Consumer Review Survey found that 45% of consumers used AI tools for local business recommendations, up from 6% a year earlier, while SOCi's 2026 Local Visibility Index found ChatGPT recommends just 1.2% of multi-location brand locations, so accurate listings and fresh reviews now determine whether paid media has anything to point consumers toward. Out-of-home is now a measurable performance channel. A 2026 OAAA and Kochava study of hundreds of campaigns found out-of-home advertising delivered a median 20% lift in in-person outcomes and 14% in digital outcomes, compared with roughly 10% for connected TV and broadcast TV. Hyperlocal targeting has to be privacy-ready. Maryland and Oregon now ban the sale of precise geolocation data, with Oregon's ban taking effect January 1, 2026, which means durable hyperlocal strategies should lean on consented first-party data, contextual signals, and market-level planning rather than purchased device-level location data. Why bigger isn't always better in ad targeting Even for national or global brands, localizing the messaging and targeting can significantly increase revenue and media ROI. Not every product or campaign is relevant to every consumer, and spending ad dollars to reach people who will never convert is a waste, which is why segmenting by geography is non-negotiable. Adidas offers a useful case study. In its third-quarter 2025 results, the company reported record quarterly revenue of €6.63 billion, and CEO Bjørn Gulden credited the brand's local orientation directly: "Being a global brand with a local mindset, empowering our markets to win their local consumers is the right strategy to be globally successful and is driving these strong results." The company's 2025 Annual Report describes that strategy as giving individual markets the autonomy to shape their own product, storytelling, partnerships, and distribution, rather than relying on a centrally defined, one-size-fits-all approach. Most brands don't need to restructure their organization to borrow that mindset. A wealth of media technology now makes it practical to get precise with targeting, tailor creative by market, and measure the impact location by location. From our seat as a media planning and buying agency, here is what brand marketers need to know. Why is hyperlocal advertising important right now? Local advertising is a large and growing share of U.S. media. BIA Advisory Services projects U.S. local ad revenue will reach $186.1 billion in 2026, roughly 9% above 2025, with mobile, social, and connected TV capturing a growing share of local budgets. Three forces explain why brand marketers should be paying closer attention. Every dollar has to work harder. In years of economic uncertainty, media buyers need to be extra judicious in allocating budget for maximum return. Concentrating spend in the markets, neighborhoods, and store trade areas with the highest conversion potential, either now or down the road, is one of the most reliable ways to protect efficiency without going dark. Audiences are fragmented, but places are not. Everybody is watching, listening to, and scrolling something different, yet consumers still live, commute, and shop in physical communities. Geography is one of the few targeting dimensions that holds steady across streaming, social, search, audio, and out-of-home, which makes it a practical organizing principle for a fragmented media plan. Consumers trust local sources more than national ones. Gallup's September 2026 survey found that just 33% of Americans trust the mass media to report the news fully, accurately, and fairly, a modest rebound from a record low of 28% in 2025. Local outlets fare far better: Pew Research Center found that 70% of U.S. adults trust information from local news organizations, versus 56% for national outlets. People are more receptive to messages that show up in their own communities, alongside content they already find credible. Local visibility also translates into store traffic. When SOCi compared its 2026 Local Visibility Index scores with Placer.ai visitation data, it found a 0.72 correlation between year-over-year changes in multi-location retailers' local visibility and year-over-year changes in their foot traffic. In other words, brands that gained ground across local search, social, and AI channels were more likely to gain store visits, too. How do I show up when people search “[my product/service] near me"? Local search is often the last step between a paid media impression and a store visit, so it deserves a place in the media plan rather than being treated as a separate SEO chore. According to Google's own Business Profile guidance, local results are based primarily on three factors: Relevance is how well a Business Profile matches what someone is searching for. This means your Google Business Profile category, business description, services, and attributes need to align closely with search intent. Distance (or Proximity) is self-explanatory – the proximity of the business to the searcher is a key factor affecting the positioning of the listing in Google Maps. Google considers the user's location to show the nearest relevant businesses. Prominence relates to how well-known and reputable your business is, both online and offline. This includes your review quantity and quality, citations across the web, and overall online authority. Accurate hours, current photos, recent activity, and a steady flow of new reviews all support these factors. Brands with many locations should manage profiles centrally, with bulk updates, so that a holiday hours change or a new service doesn't fall through the cracks at the store level. Learn how to adjust your content and search engine marketing strategies for AI-powered brand discovery. How can AI and programmatic help with hyperlocal advertising? AI has always been the engine of programmatic advertising, which enables precise targeting and measurement for optimization. What has changed is how granular brands can get without fragmenting their creative production or their budgets. Audience modeling at the ZIP code level. Machine learning models can now build audience profiles from behavioral patterns and media consumption within a given ZIP code or trade area, helping planners decide where to concentrate spend and which channels each neighborhood actually uses. Localized creative at scale. Generative AI makes dynamic creative optimization (DCO) far more practical by producing many variants of a creative asset to test. DCO platforms can then match versions to patterns in audience behavior, time of day or season, customer attributes, and local context such as weather, a home team's game, or the nearest store's address and inventory. A national spot can carry a localized end card, and a single paid social campaign can run dozens of market-specific versions. Streaming TV with local precision. Connected TV lets brands buy premium, big-screen video at the ZIP code or DMA level, which used to be possible only through local broadcast. BIA's 2026 forecast notes that social and connected TV are capturing a growing share of local advertising budgets, while broadcast television, cable, and radio continue to deliver the scale and local credibility many campaigns still need. The agency's job is to keep all of that connected. Hyperlocal tactics run across search, social, programmatic display and video, CTV, audio, and out-of-home, and without a single plan and a consistent measurement framework, local optimizations in one channel can easily work against another. Programmatic buying enables digital out-of-home media that measurably performs. How can I market to a specific region offline? Sponsor local events and teams. Professional, college, and even high school sports bring people together by the thousands, and those audiences are attentive, in a positive mindset, and loyal to their teams. Concerts and music festivals do the same. Leveraging that built-in passion and sense of community can do a lot for your brand. Adidas makes the same point in its 2025 Annual Report, pairing global partners like Liverpool FC with local ones like Penn State. Use out-of-home (OOH) and digital out-of-home (DOOH) for scale in a defined area. Dynamic creative is especially useful here: you can automatically switch messaging by time of day, weather, or foot traffic patterns, and programmatic DOOH buying makes precise targeting and measurement far easier than it was a few years ago. OOH has also built a stronger performance case. A May 2026 OAAA and Kochava study analyzing device-level data across hundreds of campaigns found that OOH delivered a median 20% lift in in-person outcomes and 14% in digital outcomes, compared with approximately 10% for both connected TV and broadcast TV. Our own experience with clients points the same way. “We've heard skepticism about whether OOH works, but we've made a real impact for clients when we've paired foot traffic measurement with our OOH campaigns. We geofence the OOH targeting, and we can see who has passed by and whether they come into stores. From there, we can track lifts or changes in foot traffic after a billboard goes up. We've seen increases as high as 37% for a single store!” - Georgia Schreiner, Exverus Media Director Create experiences people want to share. Experiential activations like pop-ups, in-store appearances, and guerrilla stunts make a big impression, bring people together, and can spur thousands of organic social posts that extend reach well beyond the people who were there in person. Where does retail media fit into a hyperlocal plan? For brands sold through retailers, retail media networks offer one of the most useful hyperlocal signals available: what is actually selling, and where. Because retailers can tie ad exposure to purchases from their own loyalty and transaction data, brands can see which stores and regions respond to a campaign and shift budget accordingly, rather than waiting for a quarterly sales report. Retail media also helps close the gap between a local awareness push and the shelf. A regional OOH or CTV flight can be paired with onsite and offsite retail media in the same markets, so the consumer who saw the billboard on the way to the store is reminded again on the retailer's app. Local inventory ads and in-store product listings on a Google Business Profile serve a similar role for search, showing nearby shoppers that a product is in stock before they leave home. The practical caution is that each retailer measures differently. We recommend agreeing on consistent definitions of incrementality and attribution windows across retail partners before comparing their results market by market. How do I determine which markets to run paid media campaigns in? When we run national campaigns like Equinix B2B or The Chosen theatrical premieres, we carefully choose the most important designated marketing areas (DMAs) based on factors like: Audience fit, which suggests conversion potential Scale of media availability Proximity to selling stores/retailers Size of addressable target audience in each market DMAs have historically been defined by TV and radio advertising networks, but they’re important for efficiently running paid social, search, out-of-home (OOH), experiential, and other media channels, too! Measure incrementality, not just activity Hyperlocal plans are naturally suited to testing. Because campaigns run in defined geographies, brands can compare exposed markets against similar holdout markets to see what the media actually added, rather than relying on last-click attribution that tends to undercount upper-funnel channels. Matched-market tests, foot traffic studies, and store-level sales lift all become more reliable when the plan is built geographically from the start. CASE STUDY: HABIT INCREMENTALITY STUDY Habit's Gotta Habit Meal Deals offered $6, $8, and $10 bundles across 15 states and launched alongside Habit's new brand platform, "Fresh Like That." Exverus by Brainlabs' media plan integrated brand and performance across the full funnel and was built to clear reach and frequency thresholds rather than optimize for last-click efficiency. Our incrementality study compared media-spend regions against no-spend regions in real time, pointing to our impact on actual sales increase. Habit reported 5% same-store sales growth and 7% system sales growth in Q1 2026, the quarter the campaign ran, bucking a downward category slump! Click to read more about this award-winning campaign. Build for privacy from day one Location data is now treated as sensitive in a growing number of states. Maryland's Online Data Privacy Act bans the sale of sensitive data, including precise geolocation, and Oregon followed with HB 2008, which prohibits the sale of precise geolocation data that can locate a person or device within a 1,750-foot radius, effective January 1, 2026. Other state laws generally require consent and opt-out rights for sensitive data. For brands, the takeaway isn't to abandon hyperlocal targeting. It's to build it on durable inputs: consented first-party data, retailer and publisher data used within their own environments, contextual and placement-based targeting, and market-level geography like DMAs and ZIP codes. We also recommend asking every data and measurement vendor how their location data is collected and whether it's sold or shared, since that diligence now carries legal weight. (This isn't legal advice; brands should confirm requirements with their own counsel.) It takes a team of expert media planners and analysts to connect all of these pieces and give you a bird's-eye view of how hyperlocal advertising contributes to overall brand-building and sales growth. FAQs about Hyperlocal Advertising What is hyperlocal advertising? Hyperlocal advertising is the practice of targeting ads, messaging, and media placements to a narrowly defined geographic area, such as a ZIP code, neighborhood, store trade area, or individual DMA, rather than to a national audience. It combines geographic targeting with locally relevant creative, so the ad reflects the place where the consumer actually lives, works, or shops. Is hyperlocal advertising only for small businesses? No. National and global brands use hyperlocal advertising to concentrate spend in their highest-potential markets, support individual stores or retail partners, and localize national creative. Adidas, for example, credits its "global brand with a local mindset" strategy with its record 2025 results. What channels can be used for hyperlocal advertising? Almost every major channel can be targeted geographically, including paid search, paid social, programmatic display and video, connected TV, streaming audio, local broadcast TV and radio, out-of-home and digital out-of-home, retail media, and experiential activations such as sponsorships and pop-ups. How do you measure the results of hyperlocal advertising? The most reliable approach compares markets that received the media against similar markets that didn't, measuring changes in store visits, sales, web traffic, or search volume. Foot traffic attribution, store-level sales lift studies, and retail media closed-loop reporting are also common, and they work best when the campaign is planned geographically from the start. How does AI search affect local visibility? Consumers increasingly ask AI assistants for local recommendations, and those assistants recommend far fewer businesses than a traditional search results page. SOCi's 2026 Local Visibility Index found ChatGPT recommended 1.2% of the locations it studied, versus 35.9% appearing in Google's local 3-Pack, so accurate listings and strong, recent reviews across platforms have become essential. Is hyperlocal targeting affected by privacy laws? Yes. Precise geolocation is considered sensitive data under many state privacy laws, and Maryland and Oregon now ban its sale outright. Brands can still run effective hyperlocal campaigns by relying on consented first-party data, contextual and placement-based targeting, and market-level geography such as DMAs and ZIP codes. For more media strategies, campaigns, and agency news, join our free, weekly Paid Media Insights newsletter.

Learn why over-indexing on short-term performance erodes growth, and how to balance brand building and sales activation in your next media budget. Disproportionately focusing on short-term performance over long-term brand-building will hurt your overall success. Key Takeaways 1. Short-termism is rising as marketing budgets stall: in WARC's Voice of the Marketer 2026 survey of more than 1,000 marketers, 55% named short-termism among their biggest concerns, up from 25% in 2022, while Gartner's 2026 CMO Spend Survey shows marketing budgets flat at 7.8% of company revenue. 2. The size of the budget matters more than its efficiency: Les Binet and Will Davies' regression analysis of the IPA Databank found that budget size explains 89% of the variation in net profit, making scale roughly 8x more important than ROI optimization in driving absolute profit growth. 3. The 60:40 brand-to-activation split is a starting benchmark rather than a fixed formula; WARC's guidance points to roughly 30% of spend on equity-led advertising as a minimum floor and treats more than 25% of spend on search as a warning sign of over-reliance on existing demand. 4. Brand and performance deliver the most when planned as one integrated budget, yet a 2026 WARC/ANA survey found only 30% of companies run a single integrated budget with one set of metrics, while 65% keep brand and performance budgets separate. Table of Contents: The long and short of it What is short-termism? The difference between long and short tactics Any media channel can build brand or drive a sale Finding the right brand/performance split Why the size of the budget matters more than the split How to protect brand investment in your next media plan Frequently asked questions New WARC research proves media is a marathon, not a sprint The long and short of it If you took a marketing class at any point in the last decade, chances are good you've read that reliable staple, The Long and the Short of It by Les Binet and Peter Field. Published by the IPA in 2013, the research is now more than a decade old, and its core warning feels more relevant to today's brand campaigns than ever. As CMOs and brand leaders lock in next year's plans, that relevance is hard to miss. Gartner's 2026 CMO Spend Survey, cited in WARC's new report Budgets that build brands, shows marketing budgets holding flat at 7.8% of company revenue, with the average budget 18% lower than it was just four years ago. More than 60% of marketers in a WARC/ANA survey have seen budgets flat or down over the past two years and expect the same this year. When times are tight, it's understandable that marketers feel the pull to close the sale and place disproportionate emphasis on short-term performance metrics. The immediate ROI numbers look attractive, the dashboards update daily, and the CFO likes what they see. But we caution marketers not to lose sight of the long-term brand trajectory. Over-indexing on the short term is a mistake called short-termism, and here's why overcoming it is essential to sustained brand growth. "Every CMO we work with is being held to revenue, and that pressure is real. But when brands optimize only for what they can attribute this month, they quietly starve the demand that next year's performance depends on. Our job is to bring brand and performance together and prove they work as one system." TALIA ARNOLD, MANAGING PARTNER, EXVERUS BY BRAINLABS What is short-termism? Short-termism is the marketing fallacy of focusing too heavily on acquiring new customers and activating sales, at the expense of building long-term customer retention, loyalty, and brand equity. It rarely looks like a mistake in the moment. It looks like efficiency, right up until acquisition costs creep higher, conversion rates soften, and the brand has fewer people already predisposed to choose it. In The Long and the Short of It, Binet and Field identified two distinct yet interconnected communication approaches. The "long" refers to brand building over a timeframe of three years or more, while the "short" refers to sales activation within a 12-month horizon. Several forces steer marketers toward shortsighted strategies: the rise of digital media suppliers whose reporting rewards immediate response growing pressure to prove advertising's value in hard numbers, and a shortage of the statistical skills needed to measure effects that unfold over years rather than weeks. Budget pressure makes all of it worse. WARC's research finds that when budgets shrink, marketers are more likely to shift money into performance channels, lean on discounting, and switch to cheaper media. Among marketers expecting budget growth, 51% planned to increase brand investment, compared with just 29% of those expecting a decline. And concern is climbing fast. In WARC's Voice of the Marketer 2026 survey of more than 1,000 marketers, 55% ranked short-termism among their biggest concerns, up from 25% in 2022. The danger is what WARC calls the "doom loop": when growth slows, brands optimize spend against narrow signals like platform-specific ROAS, which slows growth further and restarts the cycle. AI-driven ad platforms, which excel at finding and converting in-market buyers, can accelerate that spiral if they become the only play. The difference between long and short tactics Identifying what counts as "long" and "short" in real-world media plans can be challenging. Both share the same overarching purpose, which is driving commercial growth, but they operate at different speeds and through different mechanisms. The short-term, sales activation component shows up in calls to action like visiting a website, purchasing a product, or responding to a limited-time offer. It targets people who are already close to buying, and its effects are big, immediate, and easy to attribute. Long-term brand building, by contrast, aims to create lasting memories and associations that drive enduring changes in behavior, such as building awareness among new consumers or driving consideration for premium products. Its sales effects are smaller in any given week, but they accumulate and decay slowly. Binet and Field's original IPA analysis, which covered 996 campaigns across 700 brands and 83 categories, made the relationship clear: there are no long-term effects without short-term effects, but long-term effects are not simply the sum of short-term ones. Activation is vital for efficiency, while brand building drives growth and profit. You need both, and the same research found that campaigns integrating brand and activation channels outperformed campaigns that relied on either alone. Learn how to build a strong brand equity foundation so you're ready before competitors move in and threaten your market position. Any media channel can build brand or drive a sale Misconceptions often arise when marketers assign media exclusively to one approach or the other. Certain channels may lean naturally toward the long or the short, but any medium can serve both purposes effectively. Retail media, often treated as a pure performance tool, can be harnessed for long-term brand-building objectives, and traditionally "brand" channels like Streaming TV and Audio can be held accountable to business outcomes. What actually determines whether a tactic builds the brand or activates sales is the objective, the creative, the audience, and, critically, how success is measured. In Media in Focus, Binet and Field observed that activation effects are relatively easy to measure because they tend to be big, immediate, and direct, producing the biggest sales responses within six months or less. Any measurement framework built only on short windows will therefore over-credit activation and under-credit brand, which is short-termism hard-coded into the dashboard. That's why we redefine what KPIs look like for Streaming, Audio, and Experiential media, connecting brand media to the performance outcomes our clients are increasingly held to. In practice, that means balancing tentpole moments for brand-building impact with an always-on presence in high-intent channels like Retail Media and Search, then using brand lift studies, incrementality testing, and media mix modeling to see the full picture rather than the last click. Learn how we use MMM, MTA, incrementality testing and other brand health tracking methods to measure the impact of the full funnel at once. Finding the right brand/performance split The well-known 60:40 rule recommends allocating roughly 60% of a marketing budget to brand building and 40% to sales activation. Though certainly oversimplified, it remains a useful guardrail that helps marketers keep their overall goals in perspective and resist short-termism. It was never meant as a universal constant. In their follow-up research, Effectiveness in Context, Binet and Field examined how the balance shifts across categories, purchase behaviors, and brand types, while concluding that "there is no context in which short-term sales activation is the primary driver of growth". WARC's guidance adds two practical guardrails: A sensible floor for equity-led advertising is around 30% of spend; below that, brand building may struggle to reach enough future buyers to matter. And in most cases, allocating more than 25% of the budget to search is a warning sign of the doom loop, since search largely captures demand that already exists. For many brands, Analytic Partners' ROI Genome suggests the optimal share for equity building will exceed 50%, and for some it may approach 70%. Your brand's starting point matters, too. A framework from BERA.ai featured in the report suggests Stable, successful brands can run close to a 50/50 split Brands with high familiarity but fading relevance should lean to roughly 60% brand Brands with passionate fans but limited familiarity should direct 60% to 90% toward brand; and Brands with high awareness but low interest may need more than 90% of ad spend on brand to revitalize equity. Why the size of the budget matters more than the split Short-termism isn't only about how a budget is divided. It's also about how small budgets get when efficiency becomes the goal. In a regression analysis of the IPA Databank, effectiveness experts Les Binet and Will Davies found that 89% of the variation in net profit is driven by the size of the budget, and only 11% by what marketers do to improve the return on that spend. Sheer scale, in other words, is roughly eight times more important than ROI optimization in driving absolute profit growth. Binet calls this the paradox of efficiency: ROI tends to peak at very low budget levels, well below the profit-maximizing point, so brands that chase the highest ROI number tend to underspend. The scale thresholds are steep. In the UK, Binet's research found it takes 30 million to 60 million exposures to produce a statistically significant sales uplift, and 200 million to 1 billion exposures to deliver award-winning market share growth. Pulling back in a downturn carries real risk, too. According to Analytic Partners, brands that increased media investment during the last recession realized 17% growth in incremental sales, and 60% of them saw ROI improve. Meanwhile, Ehrenberg-Bass Institute research on brands that stopped broad-reach advertising for a year or more found sales declined in the first year and every year after, with smaller brands and already-declining brands falling fastest. How to protect brand investment in your next media plan Set the ratio deliberately, not by default. Start from a benchmark like 60:40, then adjust it for your brand's equity, category, and growth stage. The worst split is the one that emerges by accident as brand line items get trimmed quarter by quarter. Speak the language of capital, not activity. Marketers tend to lose budget battles when they defend brand investment with awareness and impressions. Instead, tie brand to the levers finance already tracks: pricing power, customer acquisition cost, retention and lifetime value, and distribution leverage. Indicative BERA.ai data from more than 30 marketing mix modeling studies found brand equity contributed an average of 15% of baseline revenue, sales that are at risk when brand building stops. Match measurement windows to the effect you're measuring. Weekly swings in ROAS, CTR, and CPM reflect seasonality, creative fatigue, and platform noise, not strategy, while the signals that predict future revenue, like brand lift and MMM, need a quarter to become directional. At Exverus, we use dual cadence measurement: weekly check-ins for pacing and spend efficiency, and quarterly reviews of brand lift, awareness, and media mix modeling. Make at least one forward-looking metric, such as awareness, consideration, or brand lift, non-negotiable in every quarterly business review. Commit to creative consistency. Brand effects compound when audiences see a recognizable platform repeatedly over time. Constantly swapping campaign ideas resets that compounding. Start the conversation before budget season. Short-termism thrives when the CFO only sees last-click ROI. Building a shared investment logic with finance early, with both sides using the same metrics, helps brand investment survive economic cycles. Learn tested-and-proven media strategies for outsmarting larger competitors with agility, brand positioning, and creativity. FAQs What is short-termism in marketing? Short-termism is the tendency to over-invest in sales activation and near-term performance metrics, such as clicks, conversions, and immediate ROAS, while under-investing in long-term brand building. It typically produces strong short-term numbers but weakens growth over time as brand awareness and preference erode and customer acquisition becomes more expensive. In WARC's Voice of the Marketer 2026 survey, 55% of marketers ranked short-termism among their biggest concerns. What is the 60:40 rule in marketing? The 60:40 rule is a budgeting guideline from Les Binet and Peter Field's IPA research recommending that brands allocate roughly 60% of marketing investment to long-term brand building and 40% to short-term sales activation. It was derived from an analysis of 996 campaigns in the IPA Effectiveness Databank and is best used as a starting benchmark rather than a fixed rule. Does the 60:40 split apply to every brand? No. The right balance depends on a brand's category, maturity, and existing equity. A BERA.ai framework featured in WARC's Budgets that build brands report suggests stable, successful brands can run close to 50/50, while brands with high awareness but low interest may need more than 90% of ad spend on brand building to revitalize equity. What is the minimum share of a marketing budget that should go to brand building? WARC's guidance suggests a floor of around 30% of spend on equity-led advertising. Below that level, returns tend to drop off significantly because brand-building activity struggles to reach enough future buyers. For many brands, the optimal share is considerably higher, often above 50%. Does the size of a marketing budget matter more than how efficiently it's spent? In absolute profit terms, yes. Les Binet and Will Davies' regression analysis of the IPA Databank found that budget size explains 89% of the variation in net profit, while ROI optimization explains only 11%. Because ROI tends to peak at low spend levels, brands that chase the highest ROI number often underspend and leave profit on the table. How long does brand advertising take to show results? Brand-building effects build gradually and decay slowly, so they are best evaluated over a year or more. Because most category buyers are not in market at any given time, budget shifts aimed at future buyers may take several quarters to show an effect, which is why short measurement windows tend to undervalue brand investment. Can performance channels like paid social and search build a brand? Yes. No channel is inherently limited to brand or performance. Paid social, streaming, programmatic, and retail media can all support long-term brand goals when they are planned with broad-reach objectives, consistent creative, and measurement that looks beyond immediate conversions. How should brands measure the impact of brand building? Brands can measure brand building with a combination of brand lift studies, incrementality testing, media mix modeling that accounts for brand equity, and longitudinal brand health tracking. Exverus recommends dual cadence measurement, with weekly reporting for pacing and spend efficiency and quarterly reporting for brand lift, awareness, and MMM. Linking shifts in brand equity to baseline revenue then helps translate brand performance into terms the CFO already uses. Should brands cut brand advertising during an economic downturn? Cutting brand investment can protect short-term margins, but the evidence points to long-term costs. Analytic Partners found brands that increased media investment during the last recession saw 17% growth in incremental sales, and Ehrenberg-Bass Institute research shows sales decline every year a brand stays dark, with smaller brands falling fastest. For more performance marketing tips, agency news, and campaigns, subscribe to our weekly Paid Media Insights newsletter. AI Disclosure: We use AI models to quickly consolidate information from top industry sources and combine it with our real-world expertise. Every word drafted is carefully reviewed, edited, and confirmed by human eyes and hands for accuracy and quality. All information on exverus.com has been executive-approved and is updated daily.

Exverus by Brainlabs is an official Agency Partner of Tracksuit, a brand health tracking platform providing clients an edge in brand-building, category positioning, and competitive insights. Brand health tracking platform Tracksuit has named Exverus by Brainlabs an official Agency Partner, giving the independent media agency an edge in helping clients build brand equity, monitor category positioning, and gather competitive insights. Tracksuit runs ongoing consumer surveys to measure brand awareness, consideration, usage, and preference against clients' competitors. "Tracksuit gives us the clear evidence we need to show clients that consistent upper-funnel media investment pays off, so we can confidently justify every dollar we spend." JOSHUA EDELMAN, M.A.,VP ANALYTICS, EXVERUS When marketing budgets tighten, brand-building media is often the first to get cut, to the detriment of long-term business growth. WARC's 2026 report, "The Pace Principle 2.0," explains why short performance marketing plays fail to compound: brands leaning too hard on quick-hit social spikes hit a "platform ceiling" — content loses momentum the moment paid promotion stops, because it never had time to build beyond a single channel or moment. Learn how to pace out media spend for the most efficient, sustained growth. By collecting sophisticated audience insights, competitive intelligence, and the impacts of upper-funnel media on downstream sales, we can build more agile campaigns and be prepared for market fluctuations. We can also instill long-term customer loyalty (a rarity these days) by staying one step ahead of the category and building retention programs that consumers actually care about. Learn more about how Exverus helps clients outsmart their competition with strategic category positioning, agility, and creative media every day: About Tracksuit Tracksuit is the modern brand health tracking platform trusted by over 1,000 consumer brands worldwide to measure and prove the impact of brand-building. Built on rigorous data, Tracksuit gives brands a clear, ongoing picture of their health, tracking how they're perceived today and how that's shifting as the ways people discover and evaluate brands evolve. Founded in 2021, the company now operates in 25 markets including the U.S., Canada, the U.K., Europe, Australia and New Zealand. Visit www.tracksuit.com. About Exverus by Brainlabs Founded in 2014, Exverus is a global, independent media agency growing brands through full-funnel media planning & buying, traditional and programmatic advertising, retail media & e-commerce, paid search, paid social, and analytics. Our data-driven media plans combine brand and performance under one scientific brain to confidently allocate every ad dollar for the maximum return. Named for the Latin phrase "from the truth", Exverus (acquired by Brainlabs in 2025) is dedicated to transparency and long-term client trust. Learn more at exverus.com. Media Contact: Michelle Andrade michelle.andrade@exverus.com For more media strategies, agency news, and campaigns, join our free, weekly Paid Media Insights newsletter.

Unified commerce connects retail media, social, search and in-store into one path to purchase. Learn six steps to build one, plus a real campaign example. Key Takeaways Unified commerce integrates customer-facing channels and back-end systems, including e-commerce, point of sale, inventory, fulfillment and customer data, into a single source of truth, while omnichannel connects channels for the shopper but often leaves the underlying systems separate. Connected shoppers are worth more to brands. Incisiv's 2025 State of the Industry report found that multi-channel shoppers spend 15% more per order and show 70% higher year-over-year retention than single-channel shoppers. Paid media can work as retention infrastructure, not only acquisition, through tools such as Amazon's Brand Tailored Promotions, which let brands offer exclusive discounts to repeat, recent and high-spend customers. In Exverus by Brainlabs' 2024 "Marathons to Mainstream" campaign for Honey Stinger, one connected plan across audio, social, programmatic, search, Amazon and in-store media at Target grew gross revenue 20% year over year, nearly three times the 7% goal. We've said it before -- kill the funnel! The linear sales funnel is obsolete, because the path to purchase no longer runs in a straight line. Consumers weave between physical stores, websites, apps and social platforms with increasing fluidity, often within a single purchase. Salsify's 2026 Consumer Research, based on an October 2025 survey of more than 2,700 shoppers in the US, UK and Canada, found that 67% research products online before buying in store and 53% check products out in store before buying online. In grocery, the behavior is close to universal: FMI and NielsenIQ found that nearly 94% of grocery shoppers bought both online and in store in 2025. For brand marketers and advertisers, this presents both a challenge and an opportunity: how can you create cohesive, compelling experiences that meet potential consumers wherever they are? The answer is unified commerce. Download our original report here What is the difference between unified commerce and omnichannel? Unified commerce (UC) is the natural evolution of omnichannel strategy. Omnichannel focused on consistency across touchpoints, so a shopper could move from social media to a website to a store and recognize the same brand at each step. Unified commerce is the infrastructure underneath that experience: one platform and one customer record shared by the online store, point of sale, marketing and customer support, so every team works from the same data. As Maropost's 2026 guide to unified commerce frames it, omnichannel describes what the shopper experiences, while unified commerce is the architecture that keeps that experience consistent. For a media agency, that difference is practical rather than theoretical. UC allows us to manage optimizations, implement automation, report data and more from one platform or tech stack, instead of reconciling a dozen channel reports that each tell a partial story. Coresight Research's 2025 unified commerce landscape makes the same point from the retail side: unifying customer, product and inventory data is what lets brands and retailers make data-driven decisions in real time. The shift isn't only about technology; it's about fundamentally reimagining how brands connect with consumers. What role does retail media play in unified commerce? Retail media connects advertising to the point of purchase, both online and in store, and gives brands access to retailers' first-party shopper data. EMARKETER forecasts US retail media ad spending of $72.97 billion in 2026, so it is often the largest commerce channel a brand needs to connect to the rest of its plan. Retail media can also support retention through tools that target existing customers, such as Amazon's Brand Tailored Promotions. Why should unified commerce matter to brands, not just retailers? Customer acquisition Shoppers don't think in silos or channels. Salsify's 2026 Consumer Research found that more than half of shoppers review two to three channels before buying everyday essentials or mid-range items like apparel and beauty. The same survey found that physical stores (60%), online marketplaces (57%) and social platforms (52%) are all major places shoppers discover new products. Meanwhile, acquisition is getting more expensive: Incisiv's 2025 State of the Industry report found that 77% of retailers saw customer acquisition costs rise over the previous year. Winning brands need to understand their target consumers' habits in multiple areas of life and reach them at multiple, connectable touchpoints, so that every impression builds toward a purchase rather than starting from zero. Loyalty and retention Conventional marketing wisdom says customer loyalty lives in CRM and email, but advances in first-party data collection are changing that. The same Incisiv research found that multi-channel shoppers show 70% higher year-over-year retention than single-channel shoppers, which makes the connected customer the one worth keeping. In 2026, smart brands use paid media as retention infrastructure, not just acquisition. This could look like retail media targeting existing customers, such as Amazon's Brand Tailored Promotions, which let brands offer exclusive discounts to segments like repeat customers, recent customers and high-spend customers, or Walmart Connect's shopper segments. It could also look like paid social suppression and loyalty sequencing, and programmatic retargeting laddered to customer lifetime value. Paid media platforms are building retention strategies into their infrastructure, but most brands are still underutilizing them. Build more effective media plans Collect insights from everywhere your consumers engage with brands and build a clear data narrative, so that each media plan is smarter than the last. This matters more as budgets consolidate: EMARKETER forecasts that US retail media ad spending will reach $69.33 billion in 2026, up from $58.79 billion in 2025, with Amazon Ads and Walmart Connect taking more than 89% of the incremental dollars. When that much spend flows through a handful of retail media networks, the brands that can connect those results to search, social and in-store performance will make sharper allocation decisions than the brands reading each network's dashboard in isolation. Learn how your brand can show up in generative AI product recommendations to consumers. How to build a unified commerce strategy Map the journey, not the channels Structure your marketing plan around audience segments and the "messy middle" between first exposure and purchase, rather than around channel budgets. For each segment, ask where they discover products, where they research and where they prefer to buy. The answers rarely point to a single channel. Planning around the journey keeps every channel focused on the same question, which is what this person needs from the brand at this moment. It also keeps you ahead of rising expectations. Connect your data A unified journey needs a unified view of it. That means bringing first-party data, retailers' shopper data and media performance into one place, so that a click on social, a search on Amazon and a sale at Target can be read as parts of the same story. Work with commerce platforms and marketing technology providers that connect physical retail, e-commerce, social commerce and marketplaces. At Exverus, we use Skai to manage e-commerce search across Amazon, Walmart, Sam's Club, Instacart, Target and Kroger; other platforms in the space include Salesforce, Adyen and Kibo. Plan brand and performance as one system When brand and performance run as separate plans with separate teams and KPIs, awareness campaigns build interest that nobody is set up to capture, and conversion campaigns compete for shoppers they never helped create. Run them as one always-on plan instead: awareness channels should carry a path to purchase, and conversion channels should be built to capture the demand that awareness creates. Marketers increasingly see the value. In Skai's 2025 State of Retail Media report, 61% said a full-funnel approach delivers more consistent messaging across the customer experience, and only 2% saw no significant value in it. Make every touchpoint shoppable Every extra step between an ad and a cart is a chance to lose the sale, and most of those steps happen on a phone. PYMNTS Intelligence's 2025 Global Digital Shopping Index: U.S. Edition found that 42% of US shoppers used their phones for their most recent retail purchase, whether online or in a physical store. Newer ad formats are built to close the gap. Meta's multi-retailer ads let brands place 3 to 20 retailer links inside a single static or video ad, so shoppers can buy from the retailer they already prefer in one click instead of landing on a where-to-buy page first. Pair shoppable social and display with lean, mobile-first storefronts on each retailer, so the path from discovery to checkout stays short wherever it starts. Bridge the digital and physical shelf Most purchases still happen in stores, but most retail media dollars don't. According to EMARKETER, more than 80% of US retail sales still take place in physical stores, yet in-store retail media accounted for just 3.3% of retail media spending outside Amazon in 2025, and about one in four retail media buyers cite difficulty accessing in-store reach as a top challenge. Plan onsite, offsite and in-store retail media together, and coordinate with retail partners so the demand your media drives meets product on the shelf. For brands willing to work through the logistics, the store is one of the least crowded places to win. Measure the whole journey Develop attribution models that account for the non-linear customer journey, and back them with incrementality testing that shows which sales your media actually caused. Adoption is growing but uneven: EMARKETER and TransUnion found in July 2025 that 52% of US brand and agency marketers use incrementality testing or experiments, while Skai's 2025 report found that only about a quarter of organizations consider themselves proficient at measuring incrementality in retail media. Without that rigor, a podcast ad that drives a branded search that converts on Amazon will look like a search win and an audio loss. Media (or marketing) mix modeling, multi-touch attribution, and incrementality testing all serve different but necessary measurement goals. What are the challenges to consider in building a unified commerce strategy? Data fragmentation Bringing together in-store, online and offsite behavior requires significant investment in infrastructure and strategy, and many brands are working with legacy systems that were never designed for cross-channel integration. For advertisers, fragmentation shows up as retail media, social and search reports that can't be reconciled, which makes it hard to know which dollars actually moved product. Privacy and trust Consumers want personalization, but they are increasingly wary of how their data is used. A Clutch survey of more than 400 US consumers, released in January 2026, found that 62% find ads that follow them "creepy" and 41% are uneasy with AI-driven personalization. The same survey offers a way forward: nearly 60% said privacy laws have improved how brands handle data, which suggests that transparency and compliance can rebuild trust as regulations and expectations evolve. Delivering contextually relevant, effective ads without overwhelming consumers or violating their privacy is a delicate balance. Brands must find ways to be present without being intrusive, which in practice means frequency caps, suppression of recent purchasers and a clear value exchange for any data a shopper shares. Example of a unified commerce campaign Exverus' 2024 “Marathons to Mainstream” campaign for Honey Stinger is a good example of unified commerce. The brand wanted to grow beyond elite athletes and reach everyday fitness-seekers. Its target “Challengers” were busy, high-income exercisers who didn’t know when to use the products or where to buy them. Instead of running brand and performance as separate efforts, we built one always-on system around how these shoppers actually move between discovery and purchase. Spotify audio introduced the brand during workouts. Creator-led TikTok and Instagram content explained the products. Meta’s One-Click Multi-Retailer ads let shoppers buy from the retailer they preferred. Teads display and The Trade Desk retargeting brought back people who had shown interest. Paid search and Performance Max captured the demand all of this created, and lean digital storefronts on each retailer made it easy to convert. Physically, Amazon onsite and offsite media worked alongside large Honey Stinger product towers in Target stores nationwide. The result was one connected path across direct-to-consumer, Amazon, wholesale and the store shelf, and the numbers reflected that. Gross revenue grew 20% year over year, nearly three times the 7% goal. Amazon sales rose 40%, wholesale rose 22%, ad spend efficiency improved 37%, and retail ROAS reached $3.70, 13% above target. The path forward The brands that will dominate are obliterating the boundaries between channels completely. Your consumers are already living in a unified world. They're swiping from TikTok to Amazon to your site to a physical store without blinking. If you're still thinking in terms of "digital strategy" versus "retail strategy," you're already dead in the water. Will you be the brand that sets the standard, or the cautionary tale that couldn't keep pace? For more ad buying news and tips, join our free, weekly Paid Media Insights newsletter.

Supplement brand Theralogix & media agency Exverus' digital campaign builds access to women's health information. Nutritional supplements brand Theralogix and its media agency of record Exverus by Brainlabs celebrate ten years of filling the gaps in women’s health information via digital media channels. Their new paid search and social media campaign highlights a decade of Ovasitol, its wildly popular women’s hormonal supplement. Why it matters: Women’s health has historically been under-researched and often dismissed by the medical community, so advocacy groups, online forums, and influencers have filled the gap to bring women the information they need. In fact, it was a PCOS advocacy group that launched Ovasitol by word-of-mouth! "At Theralogix, we saw there was a dire and unmet need to help women and create a supplement that provided research-backed solutions for women's hormonal concerns and their reproductive health," says Dr. Mark Ratner, Chief Science Officer and Founder of Theralogix. It’s a story every woman is familiar with: A young woman suffering from pelvic pain is among the 42% of consumers with little confidence their healthcare system will provide affordable care. So she conducts an internet search, reading various health websites about conditions she may have. Symptoms worsen, so she takes the information to her doctor and is referred to a specialist. A severe clinician shortage delays the appointment for months. In the meantime, she peruses social media to connect with others facing similar symptoms and shares personal experiences. Now she doesn’t feel so alone. At her specialist visit, she takes diagnostic tests, and the treatment conversation begins with cost and convenience top of mind. The media planning team at Exverus supported Theralogix’s efforts to build access to information through paid search, paid social and display ads on women’s health publications. Leading the team is Georgia Schreiner, winner of the 2023 Ad Age Media Planner of the Year award. About Theralogix Theralogix raises the bar when it comes to premium, research-backed nutritional supplements. Every product is independently certified by NSF® International for content accuracy and freedom from contaminants. Theralogix has been a top physician-recommended brand for over two decades. For more information about Ovasitol and other products, visit theralogix.com. About Exverus by Brainlabs Founded in 2014, Exverus is a Los Angeles media agency elevating growth-stage brands through full-funnel media planning, traditional and programmatic advertising, retail media & e-commerce, paid search, paid social, and analytics. Named for the Latin phrase "from the truth", Exverus is dedicated to transparency and long-term client trust. Press Inquiries to: Michelle Andrade michelle.andrade@exverus.com For more media buying tips, campaigns, and agency news; subscribe to our weekly Paid Media Insights newsletter.

How our Megabrand ad campaign helped Voodoo Ranger outpace the craft beer field The Challenge: Competition brewing New Belgium Brewing's wild child, Voodoo Ranger, was facing a storm of competition from challenger brands crowding the craft beer category. The brand needed more than another standard media buy to defend Voodoo Ranger's spot at the top of the charts. They needed a full 360 campaign built to match the brand's edgy, adventurous identity at scale, across every channel where their audience actually spent time. The Strategy: An ad campaign on every screen New Belgium brought us in to bring that identity to life across a fully digital, 360 media campaign. Working with Voodoo Ranger's visually striking, edgy creative assets, designed by creative agency Fact & Fiction, we programmatically bought a carefully chosen mix of premium CTV, Snapchat, Reddit, YouTube, and other inventory as part of New Belgium's larger marketing effort. The Results: Mega beer sales! The Megabrand campaign surpassed all of New Belgium's goals for the year. Cross-channel ad awareness rose 44%, brand favorability rose 23%, and business sales grew 26% year-over-year, with the product line surpassing its full-year sales targets. Our work was recognized industry-wide. It won Best Alcoholic Beverage Marketing Campaign at the 2024 MediaPost OMMA Awards, and Adweek Media Plan of the Year for Best Use of Programmatic Media. Live Rangerously! About the Director As Associate Media Director at Exverus, Shelby’s media planning team (currently serving New Belgium & Bell's Brewing and Right Guard) combine fresh, creative ideas with sharp, precise data for industry-leading results. Shelby's work ethic and expertise have earned Adweek Media Plan of the Year, MediaPost OMMAs, & The Drum Awards. She previously ran media strategy for McDonald’s, Corona & Corona Hard Seltzer, plus entertainment properties across multicultural audiences. For more media buying tips, campaigns, and agency news; subscribe to our weekly Paid Media Insights newsletter.

Mastering your retail media search strategy can persuade shoppers already in a purchasing mindset. Key Takeaways: Retail-search now drives most retail media spending. EMARKETER forecasts U.S. retail media ad spending will reach $69.33 billion in 2026, and Sensor Tower expects search to make up nearly two-thirds of U.S. retail media advertising this year. Where a sponsored search ad appears matters as much as how often it appears. In Sensor Tower’s analysis of “dish soap” searches at Walmart, Dawn trailed Palmolive in total impressions but earned nearly three times as many top-three placements. A brand’s overall share of voice can hide who actually wins each search. Brands should benchmark keyword by keyword and defend their own branded terms, because rivals can outbid the brand owner on its own name. That happened on Walmart searches for “purina” in 2026. Return on retail media search spend depends on precision at every step. That means targeting with retailers’ first-party purchase data, owning specific long-tail keywords instead of relying on broad match, and judging results by share of voice per keyword, search position and sales growth, not impressions alone. A new set of challengers is rising up to steal share of search from Google. No, they’re not Bing or ChatGPT – they’re retail media networks (RMNs). While social media takes the reins of brand discovery, RMNs are becoming a mid-funnel consideration-driver where consumers go to learn more about brands they discover. Amazon is now the most popular place for US adults to start a product search, according to 2024 research, and EMARKETER predicts retail media ad spend will more than double over the next five years, reaching $129.93 billion by 2028. So, how can your brand influence customers right where they already shop? Read our comprehensive guide to buying retail media for growth across the funnel FAQs about retail-search What is retail media search marketing? Retail media search marketing is a strategy that helps brands appear prominently on the search results pages of retailers’ e-commerce websites and mobile apps. It can be achieved by organic or paid media tactics, onsite or off-site, leveraging the value of the immense first-party purchase data retailers hold. In other words, it’s applying the principles of search marketing to e-commerce sites and retail media networks (RMNs). What is the difference between onsite and offsite retail media? Onsite is a retail media solution that displays advertisements for brands within a retailer’s website or mobile app. An example is opening Walmart’s shopping app and seeing an ad for Premier Protein displayed at the top of the search results page for “protein shakes”. Off-site is media published by a brand on external advertising platforms, including traditional search engines, social media, display, video, mobile, audio ads, and more. Currently, the biggest driver of off-site retail media growth is Connected TV (CTV)! Is retail media the same thing as Google Retail Search? Not exactly. Retail Search is a specific service provided by Google Cloud that some retailers use to employ similar Google Search type capabilities but with the retailer’s own products. Most retail media search ads are bought through RMNs or demand-side platforms (DSPs). Why does retail media search matter for brands right now? Retail media search is no longer the side channel it once was. EMARKETER forecasts U.S. retail media ad spending will reach $69.33 billion in 2026, up from $58.79 billion in 2025, and search is the format carrying most of that weight: Sensor Tower’s Decoding Retail Search 2026 playbook expects search to account for nearly two-thirds of U.S. retail media advertising this year! High purchase intent Sponsored search advertising has exploded in the last couple of years because consumers come to retailer sites or apps already in a purchasing mindset – no demand generation required. Precise targeting capabilities Social media networks may have data on what you’ve shown interest in before, but retailers know what you’ve actually bought before. That makes their deep wells of first-party consumer data extremely valuable for efficient targeting and closed-loop measurement. Learn how AI search tools are impacting our paid search strategies How can brands sharpen their retail media search strategy? Five moves make the biggest difference: prioritize home page placements for visibility, segment audiences precisely using retailer first-party data, own long-tail niche keywords instead of relying on broad match, plan for the full nonlinear customer journey (not just the final click), and track the metrics that actually map to business sales growth. PRIORITIZE HOME PAGE PLACEMENTS Visibility isn’t only about how often a brand appears. It’s also about where. Sensor Tower’s analysis of the “dish soap” search at Walmart found that Dawn trailed Palmolive in total sponsored search impressions from January through August 2026, yet earned nearly three times as many top-three impressions. More than half of Dawn’s impressions landed in the first three results, compared with just 15% of Palmolive’s. A brand can lead on impressions and still lose the spots shoppers see first. Here’s a good visualization of the purpose each page level of an e-commerce site serves: Photo Credit: Google Cloud SEGMENT YOUR AUDIENCE If your feminine product ads are being served to biologically male customers, those wasted impressions are wasted ad dollars. Every product isn’t right for every consumer! To optimize your retail media budget, you’ll need to get precise with your targeting and segment your audiences. Fortunately, the first-party data provided by retail media networks solve this problem very well, if you’re putting in the right audience parameters. Check out this excellent list of audience segments put together by the IAB: Photo Credit: Jeffrey Bustos, IAB DOMINATE YOUR NICHE “Find the long-tail search terms that resonate with your consumers best, and aim to own those key terms. Be specific; do not take your hands off the wheel, going broad-match and letting the ‘algorithm’ do the work.” MICHAEL ROBBINS, associate director of paid search & social, Exverus by Brainlabs Take this example from our back-to-school marketing guide: Adding contextual keywords to your search mix can boost visibility and drive sales. For instance, a granola bar company could add long-tail keywords like “granola bars for school lunches”, or “healthy after-school snacks” to their current bidding strategy. Category-level share of voice can hide a lot. In Sensor Tower’s Instacart ice cream case study, Häagen-Dazs earned 39% of impressions across a four-brand competitive set, but leadership changed keyword by keyword. Breyers led “vanilla ice cream” with 42%, and Wells Enterprises led “halo top” with 78%. How crowded a term is matters too. At Target, “dog treats” drew 27 competing brands against nine for “dry dog food,” even though it generated fewer impressions. Branded terms need defending as well. At Walmart, competing brands collectively earned more impressions than Purina on searches for “purina” and its own “fancy feast.” Blue Buffalo, by contrast, captured 70% of impressions on searches for its own name. Being specific means watching who is bidding on your name, not just choosing which terms to bid on. Seasonal timing compounds all of this. Instacart searches for “ice cream” peaked sharply in May 2026, and Wells Enterprises responded with a 151% month-over-month jump in sponsored search impressions. Emerging terms move just as fast: Walmart searches for “lip stain” rose 66% year over year, and COVERGIRL claimed a 32% share of voice before most rivals scaled up. Seasonality is an important consideration for marketers in terms of predicting demand, planning sales, and measuring campaigns. CONSIDER THE WHOLE CUSTOMER JOURNEY Despite the popularity of e-commerce and online shopping, most consumers are operating in a “unified commerce” style: either buying online and picking up in store, buying online and returning in store, or discovering brands in-store and following on social media. To beat the competition, you’ll need to meet your target customer at each point along their nonlinear journey. Don't forget to influence them BEFORE they start shopping - using tactics like TV, video, audio and OOH to improve brand perception and credibility. CHOOSE YOUR METRICS WISELY As with any media tactic, it’s imperative to use the right metrics for your brand’s specific campaign goals. Impressions alone won’t tell you whether retail search is earning its keep. Pair them with keyword-level share of voice and search position, then connect those signals to sales growth through marketing mix modeling (MMM), multi-touch attribution, (MTA), and/or brand lift studies. The right media agency can help you figure out what goals and metrics make the most sense for your business and how you can exceed them! Your retail media search strategy is key to eclipsing your business objectives. For further reference: Sensor Tower, Decoding Retail Search 2026: A Data-Driven Playbook for Marketers EMARKETER, Retail Media Ad Spending Forecast and Trends H2 2025 For more media strategies, campaigns, and agency news, subscribe to our weekly Paid Media Insights newsletter. AI Disclosure: We use AI models to quickly consolidate information from top industry sources and combine it with our real-world expertise. Every word drafted is carefully reviewed, edited, and confirmed by human eyes and hands for accuracy and quality. All information on exverus.com has been executive-approved and is updated daily.

Marketing mix modeling shows which channels actually drive growth. Learn how MMM works, how it compares to MTA and incrementality, and which tools to use. Key Takeaways Marketing mix modeling (MMM) uses aggregated historical spend, sales, and external data rather than user-level tracking to estimate how much each marketing channel contributes to business outcomes, which makes it privacy-compliant by design. MMM is back at the center of brand measurement plans: in a July 2025 EMARKETER and TransUnion survey, 46.9% of US marketers said they plan to invest more in MMM over the next year, and 27.6% named it the most reliable measurement methodology, more than any other answer. MMM, multi-touch attribution (MTA), and incrementality testing answer different questions. MMM guides cross-channel budget allocation, MTA guides day-to-day digital optimization, and incrementality testing proves whether media caused a lift, so the strongest measurement programs use all three. Incrementality tests make MMM more accurate. Bayesian models such as Google's open-source Meridian can be calibrated with experiment results, and in Exverus by Brainlabs' 2026 geo-based incrementality study for Habit, the promoted meal deal's share of total sales in test markets rose 18.6% above the pre-campaign baseline at 99% statistical significance. Learn tested and proven methods of outsmarting the competition with agility, brand positioning, and creativity. How do you predict the outcome of your brand marketing campaigns? Without the right measurement in place, a media plan can feel like a very expensive shot in the dark. Brands are buying across more retailers, streaming platforms, social feeds, and retail media networks than ever, and each platform reports its own version of success. Add up every platform's self-reported conversions and you will often find they claim more sales than your business actually made. Marketers know it, too. According to the IAB and BWG Global's State of Data 2026 report, three out of four marketers say their measurement approaches, including attribution, incrementality, and MMM, are not delivering the speed, accuracy, or trust they need. And in an EMARKETER survey with Snap, just one in five marketers said they were confident in last-click attribution. That gap is exactly why marketing mix modeling has moved from a once-a-year analytics exercise to a core part of how modern brands plan and defend their budgets. This guide covers what MMM is, why it is making a comeback, how it compares to attribution and incrementality testing, where it falls short, and the tools our analysts rely on. What is marketing mix modeling? Marketing mix modeling, also known as media mix modeling (MMM), is a each marketing channel, along with non-media factors like pricing, promotions, seasonality, and the economy, contributes to a business outcome such as sales, revenue, or new customers. Unlike user-level attribution, MMM uses aggregated historical data, typically weekly or monthly spend and sales figures by channel and market. Because it never needs to follow an individual person across the internet, it stays privacy-compliant even as cookies and device identifiers disappear. And because it looks at every channel in the same model, it can measure offline media like TV, out-of-home, audio, and print alongside paid search, paid social, programmatic, and retail media. For brands navigating an increasingly fragmented media ecosystem, MMM is no longer a luxury reserved for the biggest CPG advertisers. It is a strategic requirement for anyone who needs to answer the question every CFO eventually asks: what would happen to revenue if we moved this money somewhere else? Talia Arnold, Cofounder of Exverus, explained onstage at MediaPost why MMM & incrementality testing are now table stakes in every media budget. Why is MMM making a comeback? Marketing mix modeling has been around for decades, but for much of the digital era it was overshadowed by click-based attribution, which promised faster, more granular answers. Three forces have pulled MMM back to the front of the measurement conversation. Signal Loss The first is signal loss. Privacy regulation, browser restrictions on third-party cookies, and app-tracking limits have made user-level attribution less complete and less trustworthy. MMM never depended on that data, so it was largely unaffected. EMARKETER notes that MMM's reliance on aggregated data rather than user-level tracking makes it well-suited to a post-cookie world. Marketer demand The second is demand from marketers themselves. According to July 2024 data from EMARKETER and Snap Inc., 61.4% of US marketers want better or faster MMM, and 30.1% believe it is the type of measurement best at identifying drivers of business value. That same survey found that over half (53.5%) of US marketers already use MMM. A year later, the commitment had deepened: in EMARKETER and TransUnion's July 2025 survey, 46.9% of US marketers planned to invest more in MMM over the following year, and 27.6% named it the most reliable measurement methodology, the top answer. Retail brands are leaning in as well, with 61% of US retail decision-makers using MMM to measure incrementality, according to Feedvisor data cited by EMARKETER. Accessibility The third is accessibility. Open-source frameworks like Google's Meridian and Meta's Robyn, along with a wave of AI-powered SaaS platforms, have made MMM more transparent, faster to run, and far less expensive than the consultancy-built models of the past. Our own VP of Analytics, Joshua Edelman, was interviewed as a source for EMARKETER's Media Mix Modeling Trends 2026 report on how adoption is evolving. The skills gap left by analytics teams that can do only do method leave major parts of the story untold. How does marketing mix modeling work? At its core, an MMM is a regression model. It looks at how your sales moved over time and asks how much of that movement can be explained by each input: media spend by channel, plus base demand and outside factors. A well-built model accounts for several realities of how advertising actually works. Adstock, or carryover, captures the fact that a TV flight or a YouTube campaign keeps influencing purchases for weeks after it ends. Saturation, or diminishing returns, captures the point at which each additional dollar in a channel buys less incremental growth than the dollar before it. Base sales separate the revenue your brand would earn with no advertising at all from the revenue media actually drove. And control variables like pricing, promotions, distribution, weather, and seasonality keep the model from crediting media for sales lifts it did not cause. Once the model is built, its real value is forward-looking. Scenario planning lets marketers simulate how revenue would respond to different budget allocations before moving real money, so a team can test what happens if 15% of paid social shifts into CTV, or if a channel is paused entirely, without the risk of finding out in market. How is AI changing MMM? AI and machine learning are making marketing mix models more accurate, faster to produce, and easier to act on. More valuable data sets AI can process far larger and more varied datasets than traditional MMM, including CRM data, social sentiment, retail sell-through, and weather, and it is better at modeling the non-linear relationships between marketing inputs and outcomes. Bayesian methods, now standard in tools like Meridian, let analysts blend prior knowledge and experiment results with historical data, which produces more stable and realistic estimates of channel effectiveness. Faster automation Automation has also compressed the timeline. Data cleaning, model building, and model selection that once took a team of analysts weeks can now run in hours, which means models can be refreshed on a regular cadence instead of once a year. EMARKETER, citing MiQ, notes that modern MMM now operates on one- to three-month cycles rather than annually. That speed turns MMM from a backward-looking report card into a planning tool that can actually inform in-flight decisions. Better predictions Finally, AI improves predictive and scenario capabilities, forecasting how future campaigns are likely to perform and modeling the long-term impact of brand-building activity that short-term attribution tends to miss. What is the difference between MMM, MTA and incrementality? Marketing mix modeling, multi-touch attribution, and incrementality testing are often treated as competing options. In practice, they answer three different questions, and the strongest measurement programs use them together. EMARKETER summarizes the relationship well: MMM provides the cross-channel view, attribution guides daily optimization, and incrementality validates whether campaigns drive true lift. Marketers are investing accordingly, with 36.2% of US marketers planning to invest more in incrementality over the next year, according to EMARKETER and TransUnion. Marketing mix modeling analyzes how all marketing and non-marketing factors collectively drive sales or other KPIs. It relies on historical, aggregated data, covers online and offline channels, and is best for strategic, cross-channel budget allocation. Multi-touch attribution (MTA) assigns credit to individual digital touchpoints along a customer's path to purchase. It needs granular, user-level data, which makes it useful for near-real-time digital optimization but increasingly incomplete as signal loss grows. It also cannot see most offline media. Incrementality testing compares a test group exposed to media against a control group that is not, to determine what would have happened without the media. It is the most direct way to prove causation, and it is especially powerful when run as a geo-based test across matched markets. FOR EXAMPLE: In Habit Burger's 2026 "Gotta Habit" campaign, we built a controlled incrementality study directly into the media flight. Sales in five test markets running the campaign were measured against comparable markets that received no media support, which isolated the causal effect of our media on sales. The result: Gotta Habit Meal Deals' share of total Habit sales in test markets rose 18.6% above the pre-campaign baseline, at 99% statistical significance, while control markets showed no comparable lift. The impact showed up at the business level, too. Habit's parent company, Yum! Brands, reported that the Habit Burger & Grill division grew system sales 7% and same-store sales 5% in Q1 2026. CRM performance and third-party data initiatives contributed to that result as well, which is exactly why the controlled test mattered: it gave Habit a clean, isolated read on what media delivered, and a repeatable framework for evaluating future value offers. The campaign went on to win a 2026 MediaPost OMMA Award. What are the limitations of MMM? MMM is powerful, but it is not a crystal ball, and any partner who presents it that way should raise a flag. Because it aggregates data across time and channels, MMM struggles to evaluate individual tactics like a specific creative, audience segment, or placement, which makes it less useful for day-to-day optimization or A/B testing. Results also lag behind campaign changes, since the model needs enough data to detect an effect. Some vendor platforms operate as black boxes, making it hard to understand how results were derived or to customize the model to a brand's actual business. And at its foundation, MMM identifies statistical relationships in historical data. Without experiments to anchor it, a model can mistake correlation for causation, particularly for channels like branded search that naturally rise and fall alongside sales. None of these limitations are reasons to skip MMM. They are reasons to pair it with incrementality testing and attribution, and to choose a partner who will show you how the model works rather than just what it says. How do you calibrate MMM with incrementality studies? Calibration is where modern measurement gets its edge. Bayesian MMMs start with "priors," assumptions about how effective each channel is likely to be, and then update those assumptions based on the data. Incrementality experiments provide the best possible priors, because they are real-world causal tests rather than correlations. Google built this directly into Meridian. When the company made Meridian available to all marketers in January 2025, it described the model as relying on Bayesian causal inference that blends prior knowledge with real-world data, and noted that traditional MMMs often fail to update their assumptions based on incrementality experiments. Since then, Google has continued expanding the toolset, including integrating Meridian into Google Analytics 360. In practice, a calibrated measurement program works as a loop. The MMM sets the strategic budget allocation, incrementality tests validate or challenge what the model says about specific channels, those results feed back into the model as updated priors, and attribution handles tactical in-flight optimization. That loop is how we keep brand and performance under one scientific brain. What are the best marketing mix modeling tools? As with most things, it depends - on your needs, budget, and level of technical skill. Recent innovations in MMM tools are making it easier for advertisers to approach and understand statistical regression models. Google Meridian Meridian is Google's open-source, Bayesian MMM framework. Because it is open source, teams can examine its code and methodology and customize the model to their own business, and it can be calibrated with incrementality experiment results. Google launched it alongside a partner program of more than 20 trained and certified measurement partners. The tradeoff is that open-source models require real statistical expertise to build and interpret well. Keen Decision Systems Keen is an AI-powered MMM SaaS platform built for planning, forecasting, and optimization. Its partnership with retail data aggregator Crisp lets CPG marketers combine daily, store-level retail data with marketing mix modeling to plan, measure, and adjust budget allocations with far more precision than quarterly sales reports allow. Resonate Insights Resonate is an AI-powered consumer data platform our analysts love. By combining consumer data with machine learning, Resonate provides audience insights that go far deeper than surface-level demographics, which helps sharpen the targeting and messaging decisions that sit alongside MMM outputs. Brainlabs InsightMix Brainlabs' proprietary InsightMix tool reduces the time it takes our teams to develop MMM models from weeks to hours and allows us to iterate through hundreds of model variants to maximize accuracy and relevance to real-world business impact. Marketing mix modeling FAQs What is the difference between marketing mix modeling and media mix modeling? The terms are often used interchangeably. Strictly speaking, media mix modeling focuses on paid media channels, while marketing mix modeling includes the full marketing mix, such as pricing, promotions, and distribution, alongside media. How much data do you need for marketing mix modeling? Most models need at least two years of weekly data on spend, sales, and key non-media factors to capture seasonality and separate media effects from base demand. Brands with less history can still start, but results will carry more uncertainty, which makes calibration with incrementality tests even more important. How often should a marketing mix model be updated? Annual models are increasingly outdated. Modern MMM often runs on one- to three-month cycles, and the right cadence is the one that matches the timing of your budget decisions. Is marketing mix modeling privacy-compliant? Yes. MMM uses aggregated data such as total weekly spend and sales by channel and market, so it does not require cookies, device IDs, or any user-level tracking. Should brands use MMM, MTA, or incrementality testing? Ideally all three. MMM guides strategic, cross-channel budget allocation, MTA supports day-to-day digital optimization, and incrementality testing proves causal lift and calibrates the MMM. To ask our media experts how MMM or MTA can help manage your brand's ad budget more efficiently, shoot us a note using the form below! For more ad buying news and tips, join our free, weekly Paid Media Insights newsletter. AI Disclosure: We use AI models to quickly consolidate information from top industry sources and combine it with our real-world expertise. Every word drafted is carefully reviewed, edited, and confirmed by human eyes and hands for accuracy and quality. All information on exverus.com has been executive-approved and is updated daily.

Before you cut your media agency to save budget, weigh the hidden costs of in-house buying against what a specialist partner brings. For most brands spending on multiple channels, hiring an external media agency delivers better performance per dollar than an in-house team, because the costs of in-housing (senior talent, tools, and constant retraining as platforms change) are often larger and less visible than agency fees. But in-housing can make sense for brands with a single dominant channel, very high spend, and the budget to retain specialist talent. Many brands land on a hybrid model, depending on their capabilities and goals. Here are some of the considerations that should guide your thinking process when deciding whether to hire a digital ad agency or build a media buying team in-house: What an in-house media team really costs What a digital ad agency brings to the table When in-house buying makes sense The hybrid media buying model How to decide on a digital ad agency What an in-house media team really costs When you cut the agency fee out of your marketing budget, every job it covered moves onto your payroll: senior media strategists cost six-figure salaries (plus approximately 31% more in benefits). Then you need junior media planners/buyers, ad ops specialists, data analysts, platform experts (like Amazon, for example), and the measurement tools a media agency can spread across its whole agency roster. And bringing media in-house may not even eliminate the agency line item, as Marketing Dive reported in 2023 that 92% of marketers with in-house agencies still work with external agencies in some capacity. In fact, the biggest champions for in-housing don't claim it to be a money-saver. In the ANA's 2026 State of In-Housing report, only 9% said they view in-housing as a cost-saving alternative to external agencies. The brands that in-house well do it for control and speed, not cost. When you're conducting your cost-benefit analysis, ask every media agency you're comparing to break down its fees line by line so you can make an informed decision. The consultant's POV We know we're a little biased here. So don't take our word for it! Steve Boehler, founding partner at marketing agency consultancy Mercer Island Group, explains: Agency consultant Steve Boehler "It’s incredibly hard for marketers to staff and maintain an outstanding in-house media capability. Platforms and technology change constantly. Best practices today are different from a month ago. Specialized planning tools are needed to plan across platforms. There is no formal career path for the folks that have hands on keyboards. There is no learning from other agency clients. Staffing your own internal media capability may seem like a cost savings, but it often is not. And the actual performance often lags behind an agency’s capabilities." What a digital ad agency brings to the table Context Long-term planning Creative campaign ideas Data analysis Context Meta, Amazon, and Google are appealing directly to brands, beefing up their AI-powered campaign optimization abilities to eliminate the need for agencies. But no single media channel can fully replace digital ad agencies. Why? Because media channels are ingredients, and agencies are professional chefs. None of these platforms know what you're doing on the others, or in real life, and they don’t have a deep understanding of: what your target consumer’s complete purchase journey could look like your brand’s voice, business challenges, and category positioning how multiple marketing channels work together for brand and performance why certain campaigns perform better than others your business's sales patterns over time All of this context is absolutely necessary to plan an effective, full-funnel media campaign, evaluate its progress, and make adjustments based on actual sales. Media planning requires a long-term view and full-funnel integration. Long-term growth strategies While immediate ROI metrics can look attractive, brand marketers under pressure to close sales often get short-sighted and overlook the importance of long-term brand-building. This mistake is called short-termism, and it must be avoided to ensure brand success. Paid media efficiency isn't about eliminating channels -- it's about reaching new consumers everywhere they discover and building swift, elegant paths to purchase. We go long. Media planners collect deep audience- and competitive-insights to build a bespoke, full-funnel media strategy that guarantees the most bang for your buck. New research from WARC proves media is a marathon, not a sprint Creative campaign ideas Digital ad agencies live at the intersection of creativity and technology, where bold media ideas meet cutting-edge execution to drive real business results. In order to remain at the forefront, we strategically partner with advanced ad tech vendors and publishers to unlock transformative value for our clients. For example, in March, we partnered with SeenThis to launch a new ad format called Social Reach, which splashes brands’ existing social videos across the open web in PubMatic’s premium Display slots. Our innovation beat Meta Ads' efficiency by 50%! You can see more of the creative ideas we've brought to life on our Campaigns page. Sophisticated data analysis Modern, AI-powered MMM, MTA, and brand measurement capabilities that were once reserved for the biggest high-rollers are now available to brands of all sizes through your media agency partner. Our in-house media buyers and data analysts use platforms like Keen Decision Systems, Resonate, Skai, and DoubleVerify to justify every recommendation with brand safety and suitability for clients’ peace of mind. Again, we're not just reporting today's sales performance -- we're evaluating your whole brand's health to ensure continued growth tomorrow and next year. When in-house media buying makes sense In-housing isn't altogether a bad idea, just a specific one. It tends to work best for brands where a single channel, such as Paid Search or Amazon, drives most of the business, so a small team can go deep instead of wide. It helps when spend is high enough that the additional costs of labor and tech are smaller than the fees saved. It also suits brands with rich first-party data they'd rather keep close to home. As Marketing Dive noted, in-house teams can access a company's first-party data more quickly and securely than external agencies can. It's no coincidence that the early adopters of in-house programmatic buying were mostly digital natives like Netflix and Target, whose deep first-party data gave them a head start. The strongest reasons to in-house are strategic, not financial. In the ANA study linked above, 53% of respondents said the primary role of an in-house agency is to act as a strategic partner in upstream strategy. If you need to react to sales data by the hour, or agency approval cycles are slowing you down, having the team inside your walls pays off. Just go in clear-eyed. A successful in-house team needs real career paths, a budget for tools and training, and an honest plan for the work that will stay outside. Brands that check some of these boxes but not all of them usually do best with a hybrid model. Retail media, including Amazon, is so much more than last-click. Learn how it can grow a brand top to bottom. The hybrid media buying model In a Digiday survey, 62% of marketers said hiring talent is a challenge for bringing media buying in-house. An agency consultant quoted in the same piece put it plainly: most brands now run a hybrid model because building teams in-house is expensive, and finding the talent is often the problem. In a hybrid model, the brand keeps some media functions in-house and hands the rest to a digital ad agency. The split usually follows one of a few lines: The brand might own strategy, budget, and audience data while the agency handles execution, platform management, and measurement. It might run the one channel it knows best, such as paid search or Amazon, and outsource everything else. Or it might keep always-on campaigns internal and bring in an agency for bigger launches and new channels. A few best practices we follow as an agency working with hybrid teams are: Before you divide the work, agree on who owns the platform accounts, the reporting, and the measurement, and make sure your media agency partner gives you full visibility into costs and fees. Otherwise you end up with two teams optimizing in two directions, and nobody with the full picture. Brand data stays in-house. Audiences are built on first-party data, and audiences and suppression live in your environment, not ours. Brands keep ownership. Every planned dollar is visible. We take no principal position in media or data. Every dollar from plan to placement is transparent. Advice that works with your team, not against it. We have no stake in where your budget lands. We’ll recommend what drives revenue and brand success, including keeping a channel in-house when that is the right team to run it. We add capacity and leverage, not a parallel team. We work alongside in-house teams to bring: An outside perspective sharpened across categories and strategic vision for growing brands. Scale and partner relationships that open better rates, access, and early product opportunities, passed through to you rather than kept as margin. Whitespace in-house teams don't have the bandwidth to chase. "Our goal as an agency is to amplify the work in-house teams already do, not to replace or compete with it." ~ Hillary Bram, vp performance marketing, Exverus How to decide on a digital ad agency If you've weighed the costs and decided an outside partner makes sense, either for all of your media or just part of it, the pitch process is where you find the right one. Hold every potential agency to the same five questions: Industry expertise: What experience do they have in your category or with a similar audience, and can they show examples? Your actual team: Who will work on your account day to day, and will senior leaders stay involved after the contract is signed? Staying current: How do they keep up with emerging platforms, AI, and new measurement standards? Proprietary tools: What data sources, tech platforms, and measurement tools can they bring that you couldn't access on your own? Transparency: How open are they about media costs, fees, rebates, and preferred vendor relationships? That last question matters most, because it's the one that makes an honest cost comparison with in-housing possible. If an agency hesitates to answer it, that's your answer. The media planning agency review process can be laborious and expensive for both marketers and agencies. Clarity, transparency, and communication can help. FAQs Is it cheaper to buy media in-house than to hire a digital ad agency? Usually not for brands advertising across multiple channels. Cutting the agency fee moves every job it covered onto your payroll, including senior strategists, buyers, analysts, and the tools an agency spreads across its client roster. In the ANA's 2026 State of In-Housing report, only 9% of respondents said they view in-housing as a cost-saving alternative to external agencies. When does in-house media buying make sense? In-housing works best for brands where a single channel drives most of the business, spend is high enough to justify dedicated talent and tools, and rich first-party data gives the team an edge. It can also make sense when speed and control matter more than cost. What is a hybrid media buying model? In a hybrid model, a brand keeps some media functions in-house and hands the rest to a digital ad agency. Common splits include owning strategy while the agency executes, running one core channel internally, or keeping always-on campaigns in-house while an agency handles launches and new channels. Can AI tools from Meta, Google, and Amazon replace a media agency? Platform AI can optimize campaigns within its own walls, but no single platform sees what's happening on the others, or in your business. A media agency connects the full picture: your customer's purchase journey, how channels work together, and how media drives actual sales over time. What should I ask a digital ad agency before hiring them? Ask about their industry expertise, who will actually work on your account, how they stay current, which tools and data they bring that you couldn't access on your own, and how transparent they are about costs, fees, and rebates. If an agency hesitates on that last question, that's your answer. About the author Talia Arnold is the Co-Founder and Managing Partner of Exverus by Brainlabs, an independent, full-funnel media agency serving both challenger brands and Fortune 500s. With 2​2 years in advertising, media planning, and entrepreneurship; Talia was named a 2025 CampaignUS Inspiring Women in Media and a 2024 ADWEEK Media All-Star. If you’re curious about what fresh recipes our chefs could cook up for you – let’s talk. For more advertising news and tips, join our free weekly Paid Media Insights newsletter. AI disclosure: We use AI models to quickly consolidate information from top industry sources and combine it with our real-world expertise. Every word drafted is carefully reviewed, edited, and confirmed by human eyes and hands for accuracy and quality. All information on exverus.com has been executive-approved and is updated daily.

Social media platforms are now brand discovery hubs, and search engines are now mid-funnel. Learn how to meet savvy consumers everywhere they search. Gen Z and millennials increasingly discover brands on social media, not search engines. Social platforms, creators, and communities have become where consumers first meet new products. Google and Bing are now where they go to confirm what they’ve already found. Brands that build awareness upstream, before consumers search, pay less for bottom-funnel conversions. Need efficiency in your paid media plan? Save money on lower-funnel media spend by building awareness and demand for your brand among new consumers before they search. Key Takeaways 44% of Gen Z discover new brands on social media every day. 46% of Gen Z and 35% of millennials prefer social media over traditional search engines, according to a 2024 Forbes Advisor survey of 2,000 Americans. Only 64% of Gen Z use search engines for brand discovery, compared with 94% of Baby Boomers. Establishing brand recognition early in the consumer journey reduces the premium brands pay for bottom-funnel conversions. What is discovery-driven demand? Consumers, especially Gen Z, are increasingly discovering brands without actively seeking them, a process WARC calls discovery-driven demand. The consumer journey isn’t a straight line anymore. It’s a multidimensional, curiosity-driven web shaped by discovery-first platforms. We’ve found that establishing brand recognition earlier in the journey dramatically reduces the premium you’ll pay for bottom-funnel conversions. This upstream approach doesn’t just build awareness; it creates efficiency across your entire media investment. Why brand discovery matters for your media budget Businesses that rely on traditional search traffic are being left behind by generative AI tools and shifting consumer behavior. Don’t wait to be searched for. Position your brand where discovery happens organically, and create demand before consumers even know what they’re looking for! Is social media the new search engine? For younger consumers, increasingly, yes. A 2024 Forbes Advisor survey of 2,000 Americans found that social media is rapidly gaining on traditional search engines like Google and Bing for product and trend discovery among Gen Z and millennials. Only 64% of Gen Z use search engines for brand discovery, a significant decline compared with 94% of Baby Boomers. Instead, social platforms are becoming primary search tools: 46% of Gen Z and 35% of millennials prefer them over traditional search engines. A whopping 44% of Gen Z discover new brands on social media daily! Understanding where to allocate your social media budget means the difference between major growth and major waste. Why do Gen Z and millennials trust social media for brand discovery? Trust and community. Social networks like Instagram, TikTok, and Pinterest have given voice to influencers and creators who have a credibility with younger generations that traditional marketing lacks. Ads are nice, but it’s amazing to have a creator who fits the demographics of your target buyer talk about your product. That’s why partnerships, influencer marketing, and user-generated content are vital to today’s campaigns. Micro and macro communities have formed around these creators, building a sense of authenticity and connection that search engines (and brands) can’t match on their own. Creator is a real brand growth engine. Learn how to build partnerships, instill customer loyalty, measure ROI, and more. How can brands reach Gen Z where they discover brands? Here are five ways to reach new consumers everywhere they’re open to inspiration. 1. Optimize for social search and retail search Apply SEO principles to: Instagram, where keyword-rich captions perform better than hashtags at reaching people in discovery mode TikTok, which is ripe for expanding reach and influencing viewers, particularly on its For You page and in search results Retail media networks, which can pair shopper data with sponsored recommendations more precisely than ever 2. Invest in (and repurpose) visually engaging content TikTok videos, Pinterest boards, and Social Reach activations spark curiosity and engagement. Pinterest is especially well suited to reaching people who aren’t looking for a particular product but are open to inspiration. And don’t just tout a product; build a community. Research shows that 60% of millennial consumers make a reactive purchase after experiencing FOMO (fear of missing out), most often within 24 hours. Build the perception that owning your product means belonging to a larger community, and young adult customers will loyally align themselves with your brand. While social media platforms can often feel enraging, distracting, or divisive, Pinterest commits to being an oasis of self-expression, discovery, and inspiration. 3. Create new paths to purchase Our award-winning Premier Protein campaigns for Prime Days did just that: On TikTok and Instagram, we served the kind of influencer content our target audience enjoys to create awareness. We nurtured consideration and urgency with TikTok’s interactive features. We attached shoppable links from the social videos directly to Amazon product pages with strong deals, so viewers could follow through and buy. Learn how our "Premier Protein: Winning Prime Day" campaign earned a 2024 WARC Effectiveness Award for Best Path to Purchase. 4. Start the conversation in AI-driven search To be recommended by AI-driven search, focus less on website click-through and more on product feeds that answer searchers’ natural questions. Also engage meaningfully on Reddit: its content is licensed to train Google’s AI models, and it has a similar deal with OpenAI. 5. Get OOH and IRL High-impact out-of-home (OOH) media activations are excellent awareness builders that drive branded searches. John Hoover, SVP at NPRP Media, has the proof: “OOH media drives 7x more social engagement and search than any other format. An impressive 48% of people exposed to OOH featuring a celebrity or influencer visit the product or brand’s website afterward.” Case study: The Chosen. To launch The Chosen: Last Supper, the show’s fifth season and first theatrical release, we took over Times Square with Annie Leibovitz’s portraits of the cast. The key art was unveiled live on February 14, 2025, with creator Dallas Jenkins and cast members on site, turning a media buy into a fan event that spread across social media. The results: Organic branded search reached 3.8MM in a single month Brand awareness lifted 4.6x the entertainment category norm The campaign helped drive 6.1MM ticket sales Annie Leibovitz’s portraits for The Chosen: Last Supper took over Times Square and drove 3.8MM organic branded searches in a single month Frequently asked questions (FAQs) How does Gen Z discover new brands? Gen Z discovers new brands mainly through social media, where creators, influencers, and communities introduce products before consumers ever search. According to Forbes Advisor, 44% of Gen Z discover new brands on social media every day. Is social media replacing Google for search? For younger consumers, partially. Forty-six percent of Gen Z and 35% of millennials prefer social media over traditional search engines. Search engines still matter, but they increasingly serve as a mid-funnel step where consumers confirm what they discovered elsewhere. What is discovery-driven demand? Discovery-driven demand is demand created when consumers find brands without actively looking for them, through social feeds, creator content, retail media, or out-of-home ads. Brands that build this demand early pay less for bottom-funnel conversions. How can brands optimize for social search? Brands can optimize for social search by using keyword-rich captions on Instagram, creating content built for TikTok’s search results and For You page, and applying SEO principles to retail media product listings. Ready to rethink your discovery strategy? Let’s discuss! For more media strategies, campaigns, and agency news, subscribe to our weekly Paid Media Insights newsletter. AI Disclosure: We use AI models to efficiently consolidate information from the most trusted industry sources and combine it with our real-world expertise. Every word drafted is carefully reviewed, edited, and confirmed by human eyes and hands for accuracy and quality. All information on exverus.com has been executive-approved and is updated daily.