Keen original research, July 2026
The State of Media Measurement
We asked 120 senior brand and agency leaders how they plan, measure, and defend media investment. The biggest barrier isn't the market, the model, or the money — it's alignment with finance.
The headline finding
49.2%
of advertisers have only surface-level alignment with their finance team on tying marketing metrics to business KPIs.
40.8%
override tool recommendations because they conflict with leadership expectations
30%
now use MMM as their primary budget-allocation methodology — the #1 answer
51.7%
track both funnel ends but struggle to connect awareness to conversions
48.3%
already use AI for real-time programmatic budget reallocation
Marketing and finance are speaking different languages
Only 28.3% of advertisers say finance evaluates marketing on profit, pipeline, or customer lifetime value. For everyone else, the relationship ranges from conditional acceptance — finance takes the ROAS number but demands strict proof — to treating marketing as a pure expense line.
The cost shows up in the plans themselves: when planning tools recommend a strategy, the single most common reason marketers don't follow it is that it conflicts with leadership expectations — ahead of any concern about the data or the tools.
Conflicts with leadership expectations
40.8%
Tools miss external market shifts
25.8%
Data inputs feel outdated or irrelevant
25.8%
Updates arrive too slowly to react
7.5%
A quarter of all mid-campaign plan changes (25.8%) are triggered by leadership budget directives — not by evidence.
When the model and the boardroom disagree, the boardroom wins — 4 in 10 media plans are re-drawn to match leadership expectations, not the evidence.
The metrics leadership sees are the ones marketers trust least
Given one metric to prove marketing success to the board, 62.5% would choose a revenue number. The metrics that dominate board decks today — CTR and ROAS — top the overrated list.
Click-through rate (CTR)
25.0%
Return on ad spend (ROAS)
23.3%
Brand lift / sentiment
22.5%
CPM
15.0%
Last-touch attribution
8.3%
Reach / impressions
5.8%
Total revenue
36.7%
Incremental revenue / sales lift
25.8%
Customer lifetime value
20.0%
Cost per acquisition
14.2%
Share of voice / brand equity
3.3%
62.5% choose revenue — the language finance already speaks.
Confident on paper, blind in flight
53.3%
are very confident their measurement framework captures the true ROI of the media mix…
40.8%
…but only this many are very confident they could explain why each channel gets the budget it gets.
No real-time insight for in-flight optimization
40.0%
Proving long-term brand equity vs short-term sales
27.5%
Measuring cross-channel interactions
27.5%
Cookie deprecation & privacy data loss
5.0%
68.3% need updated insights weekly or faster to optimize their mix — the cadence their current setup can't deliver.
CTV × paid search × digital audio
31.7%
Paid social × search / direct traffic
30.0%
Retail media networks × paid search
23.3%
Creator / influencer × paid social
12.5%
No mechanism to evaluate interactions
2.5%
And the funnel splits the middle: 51.7% track both brand and performance but can't connect them.
Modern methods, manual burden
MMM is now the most-used allocation methodology — brands lead at 35.0%. But cost keeps advanced measurement out of reach for many, and half of all teams say the modeling itself is their biggest time sink.
Marketing mix modeling
30.0%
Multi-touch attribution
27.5%
Last-touch / last-click
20.0%
Incrementality experiments
15.0%
Intuition & historical spend
7.5%
High cost & resource constraints
40.8%
Lack of clean, centralized data
30.8%
Slow turnaround times
20.0%
Leadership resistance
8.3%
Leadership resistance is the smallest barrier — the appetite is there; the economics aren't.
Analysis & modeling
50.0%
Data aggregation & cleaning
28.3%
Stakeholder alignment
14.2%
Execution & adjustment
7.5%
The #1 analytics tradeoff: software vs services (35.8%) — automate or keep hiring.
AI is already in the workflow — trust is the frontier
Nine in ten teams already apply AI somewhere in measurement. The leading uses attack the speed problem head-on: real-time budget reallocation (48.3%) and predictive modeling of media-mix scenarios (45.8%). What holds teams back isn't capability — it's trust: data privacy first, black-box models second.
90.8%
use AI somewhere in measurement & analytics
41.7%
name data privacy as their #1 AI concern
Real-time programmatic budget reallocation
48.3%
Predictive modeling & scenario simulation
45.8%
Automating data cleaning & ingestion
40.0%
Not using AI for measurement yet
9.2%
Top concerns: data privacy (41.7%), black-box algorithms (24.2%), over-optimization (21.7%), integration friction (12.5%).
Explore the data
Brand vs agency: same survey, different worlds
Pick a question and flip between the full sample, brand marketers, and agency leaders. The splits tell their own story — brands lead on MMM and worry about build-vs-buy; agencies bend to leadership more and fear the black box.
Alignment with finance KPIs
How would you characterize the alignment between marketing metrics and finance's business KPIs? (All respondents, n=120)
Surface-level — finance accepts metrics but demands proof
49.2%
Perfect alignment — evaluated on profit, pipeline, or CLV
28.3%
Total misalignment — marketing is an expense line
15.0%
Frequent friction — constant attribution debates
7.5%
Agencies report total misalignment more often than brands — 18.3% vs 11.7%. True alignment is a minority position on both sides.
“Marketers have a preferred set of tools they use for media planning and measurement, but their biggest barrier to success lies within their own organization. To create more harmony between marketing and finance, organizations need to align on metrics that prove the full value of that investment while also investing in tools that can better optimize for outcomes.”
Bradley Keefer Chief Revenue Officer, Keen Decision Systems Keen marketing mix modeling platform
Ready to speak finance's language?
Keen ties media plans to revenue and profit — with always-on modeling, scenario planning your CFO can interrogate, and forecasts that hold up in the boardroom. All in real time.
Keen Decision Systems is a next-generation marketing mix SaaS platform that ties investment decisions to real business outcomes. On average, Keen customers see a 25% improvement in brand performance within the first year.
Methodology
Keen Decision Systems surveyed 120 senior brand and agency marketing leaders in June 2026. The sample splits evenly: 60 brand-side, 60 agency-side. Respondents span retail, tech, finance, CPG, travel, and entertainment, with 2026 budgets from under $5M (43.3%) to over $50M (5.8%). Percentages are of the full sample unless noted and may not sum to 100 due to rounding.