Better Media Measurement Starts With Business Questions: IAB’s Matt Shapo
Advertisers have acquired an impressive collection of measurement tools over the years. The slightly less impressive part is figuring out what all those tools are actually telling them.
For Matt Shapo, senior director of measurement at IAB, the industry’s measurement challenge remains remarkably familiar. Consumers are scattered across more media channels than ever, leaving marketers trying to determine which advertising worked, how the pieces worked together and whether some customers would have bought the product anyway.
“In some respects, there’s not a lot new under the sun,” Shapo said in an interview with Beet.TV Editorial Director Lisa Granatstein at the IAB Podcast Upfront. The enduring problem is fragmentation, he said, as advertising has expanded far beyond traditional outlets into a sprawling collection of digital channels.
Measurement needs more than one answer
The fragmentation has helped fuel debate over different measurement approaches, including marketing mix modeling and multi-touch attribution. Shapo thinks calling it a contest misses the point.
“I don’t think of it as a debate,” he said. “I think of it as two very important measurement methodologies which serve slightly different purposes, sometimes very different purposes, but that are both necessary.”
Marketing mix models can incorporate historical advertising exposure, promotions, economic factors and even weather to help marketers calibrate investment over time. Attribution operates closer to the bottom of the funnel, tracking behaviors such as website visits, product-page views and purchases after an advertising exposure.
Neither provides the magical single source of truth marketers have spent years hoping might emerge from a dashboard if everyone stares at it long enough.
Instead, Shapo said advertisers increasingly are combining attribution, historical models and incrementality testing. The goal is to triangulate those signals and determine whether marketing actually caused a business outcome or merely happened to be standing nearby when it occurred.
“Not only should they be thinking about it, they’re doing it,” Shapo said of combining measurement approaches. “There’s really no marketer worth their salt today that isn’t using a multitude of different sort of metrics or measurement approaches.”
Building a Rosetta Stone for ad data
Combining measurement methods becomes harder when advertisers, agencies, platforms and measurement companies use different terminology to describe the same things. Yep, the advertising industry’s enthusiasm for fragmentation extends all the way down to vocabulary.
IAB has been working on campaign data standards intended to create a common framework among those proprietary systems. Shapo compared the standards with a “Rosetta Stone” that lets companies translate their individual taxonomies into a common language.
The objective is practical. When marketers analyze campaigns, differences in naming conventions shouldn’t cause inventory or advertising experiences to disappear from the measurement.
That becomes particularly important when marketers are trying to compare activity across platforms. A banner placement described one way by an advertiser and another way by a platform should still be recognized as the same thing when the campaign results reach the dashboard.
Start with what the CFO cares about
Improving measurement also requires marketers to resist another longstanding temptation: starting with whatever metric happens to be sitting conveniently in front of them.
Shapo said advertisers increasingly are trying to start with the business outcome they want to understand, including decisions important enough to matter to the chief financial officer. Only then should they determine which measurement approach can answer the question.
Reach, frequency, impressions and website visits remain important. After all, advertising has difficulty influencing people who never encounter it. But optimizing measurement around a familiar metric simply because it is familiar can put the process backward.
“What matters more than anything is to figure out exactly what question you wanna ask ahead of time, and then make sure you build a measurement program that is designed to answer that question,” Shapo said.
Shapo said discussions within IAB committees, working groups and its Measurement Leadership Summit indicate marketers are becoming more sophisticated about that process. Instead of beginning with a metric and searching for something it proves, they are increasingly beginning with the question and desired outcome.
“First and foremost, know that you need to choose an outcome before you design a measurement,” Shapo said.
It sounds straightforward. Then again, advertising spent decades inventing increasingly sophisticated ways to measure campaigns before rediscovering the usefulness of deciding what it wanted to know first.
You’re watching Beet.TV coverage of the 2026 IAB CreatorFronts. For more videos from this series, please visit this page.
Advertisers have acquired an impressive collection of measurement tools over the years. The slightly less impressive part is figuring out what all those tools are actually telling them.
For Matt Shapo, senior director of measurement at IAB, the industry’s measurement challenge remains remarkably familiar. Consumers are scattered across more media channels than ever, leaving marketers trying to determine which advertising worked, how the pieces worked together and whether some customers would have bought the product anyway.
“In some respects, there’s not a lot new under the sun,” Shapo said in an interview with Beet.TV Editorial Director Lisa Granatstein at the IAB Podcast Upfront. The enduring problem is fragmentation, he said, as advertising has expanded far beyond traditional outlets into a sprawling collection of digital channels.
Measurement needs more than one answer
The fragmentation has helped fuel debate over different measurement approaches, including marketing mix modeling and multi-touch attribution. Shapo thinks calling it a contest misses the point.
“I don’t think of it as a debate,” he said. “I think of it as two very important measurement methodologies which serve slightly different purposes, sometimes very different purposes, but that are both necessary.”
Marketing mix models can incorporate historical advertising exposure, promotions, economic factors and even weather to help marketers calibrate investment over time. Attribution operates closer to the bottom of the funnel, tracking behaviors such as website visits, product-page views and purchases after an advertising exposure.
Neither provides the magical single source of truth marketers have spent years hoping might emerge from a dashboard if everyone stares at it long enough.
Instead, Shapo said advertisers increasingly are combining attribution, historical models and incrementality testing. The goal is to triangulate those signals and determine whether marketing actually caused a business outcome or merely happened to be standing nearby when it occurred.
“Not only should they be thinking about it, they’re doing it,” Shapo said of combining measurement approaches. “There’s really no marketer worth their salt today that isn’t using a multitude of different sort of metrics or measurement approaches.”
Building a Rosetta Stone for ad data
Combining measurement methods becomes harder when advertisers, agencies, platforms and measurement companies use different terminology to describe the same things. Yep, the advertising industry’s enthusiasm for fragmentation extends all the way down to vocabulary.
IAB has been working on campaign data standards intended to create a common framework among those proprietary systems. Shapo compared the standards with a “Rosetta Stone” that lets companies translate their individual taxonomies into a common language.
The objective is practical. When marketers analyze campaigns, differences in naming conventions shouldn’t cause inventory or advertising experiences to disappear from the measurement.
That becomes particularly important when marketers are trying to compare activity across platforms. A banner placement described one way by an advertiser and another way by a platform should still be recognized as the same thing when the campaign results reach the dashboard.
Start with what the CFO cares about
Improving measurement also requires marketers to resist another longstanding temptation: starting with whatever metric happens to be sitting conveniently in front of them.
Shapo said advertisers increasingly are trying to start with the business outcome they want to understand, including decisions important enough to matter to the chief financial officer. Only then should they determine which measurement approach can answer the question.
Reach, frequency, impressions and website visits remain important. After all, advertising has difficulty influencing people who never encounter it. But optimizing measurement around a familiar metric simply because it is familiar can put the process backward.
“What matters more than anything is to figure out exactly what question you wanna ask ahead of time, and then make sure you build a measurement program that is designed to answer that question,” Shapo said.
Shapo said discussions within IAB committees, working groups and its Measurement Leadership Summit indicate marketers are becoming more sophisticated about that process. Instead of beginning with a metric and searching for something it proves, they are increasingly beginning with the question and desired outcome.
“First and foremost, know that you need to choose an outcome before you design a measurement,” Shapo said.
It sounds straightforward. Then again, advertising spent decades inventing increasingly sophisticated ways to measure campaigns before rediscovering the usefulness of deciding what it wanted to know first.
You’re watching Beet.TV coverage of the 2026 IAB CreatorFronts. For more videos from this series, please visit this page.
