Why your measurement strategy fails before it even begins
Every marketer knows the feeling. The forecast wobbles, finance wants options by Friday, and the fastest way to look disciplined is to go dark for a quarter and wait it out.
Picture the post-campaign review. The numbers are up, the deck looks sharp, and someone is already floating next year’s budget. Then a single question lands: did the campaign actually drive those sales, or would the spike have happened anyway? Silence. Not because it’s a bad question, but because it’s the right one, asked three months too late to prove anything.
Most marketers read that and wince, because they’ve sat in that room. The instinct is to blame the modelling, the dashboards, the tech stack. But the failure happened long before any of that.
As Kauri Ballard, Senior Director at Analytic Partners, put it recently in Adnews, “nobody agreed on what needed to be measured before the activity launched, so the data that would have answered the question was never collected.”
That’s the uncomfortable truth.
Measurement is treated as something you do after the money is spent, when it’s actually a decision you make before a single dollar leaves the building. By the time the business is asking why market share slipped or why one campaign outperformed another, the window to capture the data that explains it has already closed.
The channels you can't yet prove
Sponsorship is where this bites hardest, and it’s especially live across APAC. Australia is a sporting nation, and a good sponsorship property can be a serious commercial asset for a brand of any size. The same is true of the football codes, cricket and motorsport that command audiences across the region. But proving the return means understanding the lift in awareness, consideration, acquisition or sales. Too often, when evaluation time comes, all that exists is a high-level summary or a set of annual results.
“That’s not because someone made a mistake and deleted a line in a spreadsheet,” Ballard notes, it’s that nobody asked what evidence the partnership would need to generate before signing it.
The same gap shows up across influencer activity, partnerships, and newer channels like LLMs. Marketers know when content went live, but not when impressions were actually served. They get reports, but not the granularity to read real impact. So the activity mattered, and you can feel that it mattered, but you cannot demonstrate it.
It's not a data problem, it's a planning one
Here’s the part that should reframe how you think about the problem: this is rarely a data shortage. We are all drowning in more data than ever. The constraint is planning. Most organisations simply do not know what they have accumulated, where it sits, what condition it’s in, or what it can actually tell them. Knowing you have data is not the same as being intentional about it.
Ask what you'll need to prove, before you spend
Which points to the most valuable question a marketing team can ask: what decisions do we want to make in six months, a year, two years out? That answer should shape what gets collected today. Want to compare two creative executions? They need to be identifiable in the reporting, not bundled under one campaign ID. Want to isolate the impact of a specific offer or operational change? That variable has to be tracked consistently from day one.
“Measurement starts long before the data capture itself.” adds Ballard
The good news for anyone bracing for a budget fight: closing these gaps rarely needs new technology or more money. The data usually already exists, in sales records, call centre logs, complaints, promotional history. It just lives in separate teams and separate systems, and nobody has connected it to the measurement question. The first move is an honest audit of what you already hold and whether it can answer what the business actually cares about.
The commercial consequence of skipping that step is straightforward. You keep investing in channels you cannot defend, you keep losing the room when the CFO asks for proof, and you keep relying on annual summaries to justify multi-million dollar decisions. None of that gets fixed in the analysis phase, because the analysis can only ever work with what was captured.
So the conversation has to happen before the campaign launches, before the sponsorship is signed, before the influencer brief goes out. Get that right, and the next time someone asks the killer question in the review, the answer doesn’t have to be silence.
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