MIAMI — The digital economy has spent two decades pulling consumer attention away from the physical world. Should brands with brick-and-mortar presence refocus on the time people actually spend inside their stores?
“If you think even your own experience, you visit a new place, whether is a restaurant or a store, when you have a good experience, you will talk about it,” said Guglielmino, CEO of Cuebiq, in this video interview with Beet.TV. “And there’s nothing more powerful than that in marketing.”
The argument cuts against an industry that has long been obsessed with digital signals, click-through rates, and last-touch attribution. Guglielmino’s case is that the physical visit – and what happens during it – remains an undervalued signal in the measurement stack.
The identity graph problem
Connecting a television ad exposure to a real-world store visit sounds straightforward in theory. In practice, it requires a chain of identity resolution that still has weak links. Guglielmino acknowledged the progress being made.
“At the core, the reliability of the system is the reliability of the identity graph that are really operating as the connecting tissues between a screen, a household, and their individuals and all the conversion that these individuals are making,” he said.
The challenge is one of extrapolation. Streaming platforms know who is logged in, but that logged-in universe represents only a fraction of total viewing traffic. Location data, similarly, captures only a sample of real-world movement. “You only see a sample of the population and then you have to extrapolate for all the rest,” Guglielmino said. “We still need to figure out how to properly extrapolate, but I think that by working with the highest quality data, cutting middlemen, and understanding how the sources work, you set up a data strategy for more success.”
The identity graph challenge is not unique to Cuebiq. The deprecation of third-party cookies, shifting privacy regulations, and fragmented data environments have made cross-channel attribution a persistent headache across the industry. Location intelligence, Guglielmino suggested, can help fill some of those gaps – particularly in anchoring household identity and digitizing out-of-home touchpoints – but it is not a wholesale fix.
Credit versus incrementality
Too many companies, Guglielmino argued, are focused on claiming credit for conversions rather than demonstrating incremental impact. “Everyone will be good in assigning themselves an organic visit or an organic action,” he said, “but what it really matters for the marketer is, is there a change in the behavior of the consumer?”
That framing has real consequences for how measurement vendors are selected and trusted. Guglielmino was pointed in his skepticism of media companies that bundle measurement with their own inventory sales. “What I really do not recommend is to work with media companies that are selling you the media and giving you the measurement tools because it’s not going to be agnostic,” he said. “It’s biased by design. The lion’s share of money is on the media, it’s not on the measurement.”
Cuebiq is a provider of location intelligence and consumer insights, specializing in analyzing real-world, offline behavior using anonymized, consented location data. It enables brands and marketers to track footfall attribution, measure the ROI of marketing campaigns, and target audiences based on their physical movements.
In March, Cuebiq announced a partnership with Affinity Solutions, combining Cuebiq’s location intelligence with transaction data to give brands a more complete view of how marketing activity translates into real consumer behavior – an attempt to link mid-funnel location signals with bottom-funnel purchase outcomes.
You’re watching “Bridging the Gap: Connecting In-Home TV Viewership to Real-World Outcomes” a Beet.TV Leadership series at POSSIBLE 2026, presented by Cuebiq. For more videos from this summit, please visit this page.
