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Adapting to the realities of a changing world
As a year defined by economic and political instability, rising inflation, and a dramatic shift from traditional to digital media, 2025 forced agencies to rethink their media investment and measurement strategies.
2025 forced agencies to rethink their media investment and measurement strategies as media leaders fought to prove value and secure brand budgets.
With ad spend facing both theoretical and very real cuts in some sectors, media leaders have found themselves fighting to prove value and secure brand budgets.
In December 2025, Cint’s Chris Pope (Senior Director, Data & Measurement) was joined by Josh Lebovitz (VP Director, Data & Analysis at global marketing and technology agency Digitas) for a candid fireside chat.
The pair met virtually to explore how a year of volatility, digital dominance, and budget contraction has reshaped media strategy,
If you weren’t able to join the session, have no fear: we’ve pulled together some of the key talking points for you.
Communication is key for successful measurement frameworks
The pair kicked things off with a question that has been on the mind of everyone involved in the measurement industry over the last few years, but was particularly pertinent in a year when tariffs and trade deals dominated headlines: how did 2025’s economic uncertainty impact forecasting and managing cost allocation, especially when funds are taken from media dollars?
Lebovitz acknowledged that budgets are under more scrutiny than ever before and it’s for this reason that, “It’s really important for media planners, agency folks, and clients to understand what drives business outcomes at the end of the day.”
In Lebovitz’s view, understanding what actually contributes to business growth is going to be increasingly critical in 2026 and beyond. Being armed with that knowledge will allow for more nimble media planning when sadly inevitable budgetary shrinkages occur.
One of the bigger challenges faced by teams, said Lebovitz, is that, “They tend to panic or get concerned when they don’t see an immediate performance impact. That could be within a few weeks, or a quarter, or they see slow performance from a campaign and they want things to change.”
One way around this is ensuring that there’s strong communication between people like CMOs and CFOs to make sure there’s clarity around how media effectiveness can build with time and consistency.
Build measurement frameworks that gives confidence based on short-term signals while waiting for longer-term business growth metrics to take shape.
With that in place, Lebovitz said, “We can build measurement frameworks that give us confidence based on short-term signals while we wait for longer-term business growth metrics to take shape.”
Keep consumers front of mind
The fireside chat moved on to another important area of discussion: with digital media now commanding a greater share of budgets than traditional avenues, what are the biggest measurement gaps in providing tangible outcomes-based ROI from digital investments to clients?
We’re living through a period in media measurement where teams are having to track and think through more signals than ever before, but for Lebovitz the crucial thing is always being cognizant of what signals to truly look for.
He opined that some of the biggest gaps for brands are knowing their audiences and understanding what consumers need to do to get closer to the brand in question.
“Zeroing in on consumer behavior is critical for understanding the value of a site visit, or an in-store visit, or a brand search, versus the dozens and dozens of other metrics that exist and you can get easily distracted by.”
The human touch remains a necessity
Lucid Measurement customers are hyper-aware of the importance of speed when it comes to gathering insights that assist with campaign optimization.
With that in mind, Pope asked Lebovitz a further question: what does the ideal measurement partnership or data pipeline look like to overcome delays and provide faster, more accurate client insights throughout 2026?
For the man from Digitas, it comes down to aligning on what metrics matter most. Lebovitz said that there are a few key buckets that tend to be consistent across any brand. You need to know right who you’re reaching and how often you’re reaching them, for example.
“Media buying principles haven’t gone away. If you’re not reaching enough people you wouldn’t expect the media to have a considerable impact on your business.”
Other questions to think through include “Are we considerably changing perceptions or familiarity with our brand as we continue to invest in advertising?” and “Is our creative actually resonating? Are people paying attention? Are they taking some sort of action after the fact?”
Of course, being a fireside chat that took place as 2025 drew to a close the discussion wouldn’t have been complete without touching on AI.
AI is a boon for data collection, but we still need that human hand on the wheel to think critically about our client’s business.
Lebovitz took a measured approach to the advances in technology that are reshaping just about every industry on earth. While he asserted that from a data collection and cleaning perspective AI is a boon, “We still need that human hand on the wheel. You still need that human perspective to make sure we’re thinking critically about our client’s business.”
“AI is not going to give you some sort of an emotional response to how it feels about the creative because AI for now doesn’t have any sort of feelings, but it can give you some nice direction around what may resonate based on your audience’s interest and things of that nature,” Lebovitz said.
Embrace creativity, foreground behaviors
Looking at 2026, Pope asked Lebovitz the following: beyond media efficiency, what single measurement narrative will unlock true brand budget expansion for agencies in 2026?
Taking a considered approach to creative will be of utmost importance in Lebovitz’s eyes.
“Ensuring the creative you’re putting out truly resonates and at least gets people to think of your brand when the time comes that they’re actually in the market for whatever your product is. If you’re not doing that, it’s hard for the consumer to actually end up making a purchase.”
Beyond that, behavioral measurement will also play a role in getting the most out of brands in 2026.
Tying the way your customer engages with your category into your measurement framework will enable folks to be much more pinpointed on what actually matters.
“Tying the way your customer engages with your category into your measurement framework is important,” he said. “It’s going to enable folks to just be much more pinpointed on what actually matters and how you can use that to guide or tell your clients if you’re actually driving towards meaningful outcomes.”
Move to an outcomes-based approach
Pope’s final question of the session was: What is the most critical change media planning and measurement teams must implement now to successfully align with the shift to an outcomes-based model in 2026?
“I think it’s education and communication,” said Lebovitz. “Making sure people are on the same page from brief to campaign build to reporting.”
He continued, “Bringing people together again early on is critical for anyone building new measurement frameworks. Walking your internal teams through that first is going to be really important so they understand why you want to start measuring potentially different metrics than what you’ve measured before.”
Monitoring with intent
The session was rounded off with a short Q&A. One of the questions raised was: how do you measure outcomes effectively in a fragmented media landscape where different measurement partners have different pieces of the puzzle?
According to Lebovitz, the challenge of media fragmentation highlights the value of tools like Marketing Mix Modeling. While solutions exist to measure the impact of overlapping exposures he acknowledged that these often require significant research budgets.
Monitoring with intent allows agency partners to measure the true cross-platform view of their campaigns across fragmented landscapes.
For teams without access to high-end measurement partners, the key is “intentional monitoring” where campaigns run and acknowledging that while 100% overlap is unlikely, audiences inevitably encounter messages across multiple touchpoints.
Pope added that this is something we’re really focused on at Cint. “We’re about helping agency partners measure the true cross-platform view of their campaigns across different platforms. We’re definitely on the same page as you in terms of being able to see the true cross-platform view of how things are performing.”
Learn more about Lucid Measurement
Want to know more about how you can optimize lift results for your campaigns through Lucid Measurement even when budgets are shrinking?
Get in touch with Cint today.
