We talk a great deal about being human-centric in media. We invest time in understanding audiences, identifying their needs and behaviours, and building plans designed to reach them in relevant and meaningful ways. But what would change if we applied the same human understanding to interpreting results as we do to planning campaigns? This is the question the industry needs to confront, argues Initiative’s Emma Greenhalgh.
Too often, people are central to the planning process but disappear once the campaign is live. They become impressions, clicks, completed views, cost efficiencies and benchmark comparisons. The numbers take over, while the human context that gave them meaning gets left behind.
A social campaign lands, the performance report goes out. Imagine the headline reads: “15-second video view rate exceeded benchmark by 0.5 per cent.”
While that may indicate strong delivery against a benchmark, it does not, on its own, tell us whether the campaign achieved its broader objective.
A benchmark is an average built from different brands, audiences, budgets, creative approaches and market conditions. It tells us what has happened, but not necessarily what should happen next. Your brand is not average. Your audience is not average. Your brief is not average.
Beating a benchmark may provide reassurance, but it does not automatically mean a campaign has worked. A campaign can exceed view-rate, engagement and click-through benchmarks while failing to build the brand or influence customer behaviour. Equally, a campaign can underperform against a benchmark while delivering meaningful brand impact or reaching an important audience in a valuable context.
The issue is not that benchmarks are without value. It is that they can too easily become a proxy for success when separated from the campaign’s objectives and human context.
This is not a new concern. The industry has been discussing data overload, measurement complexity and the limitations of attribution for well over a decade. But the rise of AI makes the issue even more pressing. As new tools make it easier to generate, process and optimise against data, we risk distilling every decision down to another metric, score or numerical value.
AI can help us identify patterns and work more efficiently, its outputs still require human judgement to determine whether an outcome is meaningful, culturally relevant and valuable to the people and business involved.
A human touch should be embedded
Human-centricity should not be a stage in the process, confined to audience definition or media planning. It should be embedded in our practice from beginning to end: in the brief, the strategy, the channel choices, the buying decisions, the optimisation, the evaluation and the interpretation of results.
What does the number of radio spots on a plan mean in someone’s day? What does share of voice across OOH digital panels look like to a person moving through a city? What does a completed video view represent? Did the message resonate, or did the ad simply appear at a moment when someone had a few seconds to spare?
This is not an argument against any particular channel or metric; it is an argument for interpreting each within the context of the audience, objective and outcome.
These questions help us understand what the data is telling us more clearly.
Without that human context, we risk optimising for activity rather than impact. We may direct more investment towards channels that appear to perform well against familiar metrics, without proving that further investment is creating incremental value.
This concern is reflected in Omnicom Media’s Cost of Dull Media research partnership with Amplified Intelligence, which examines the financial and brand impact of investment in low-attention environments.
There is also a tangible cost to those shifts: diminishing returns, missed opportunities and investment that appears efficient without creating meaningful incremental business value.
The answer is not to abandon efficiency, measurement or AI. It is to use them intelligently, while protecting the critical thinking needed to interpret what the numbers mean.
Instead of asking only, “Did we beat the benchmark?”, we should ask: “What does this result tell us about real human behaviour, and did that behaviour create meaningful business impact?”
This level of critical thinking should be the thread connecting every decision we make, from the initial brief through to the final evaluation. That is how we move from simply planning around people to genuinely putting people at the centre of our practice.
Emma Greenhalgh is the head of planning at Initiative.
