Australia has a major advantage over the US when it comes to fixing the advertising industry’s fragmented measurement problem, according to IAB US CEO David Cohen, who says the country’s trade associations are working together “far better” than their American counterparts.
Cohen made the comments during his first visit to Australia, speaking at IAB Australia’s MeasureUp conference in Sydney on Wednesday, where the IAB announced its Future of Measurement review.
The review found marketers have strong confidence in measuring advertising impact within individual channels, but are far less certain about the overall effectiveness of their advertising when those channels work together.
It has described Australia’s measurement landscape as being at a “critical juncture”.
In an interview with B&T after his presentation, Cohen said Australia’s collaborative industry structure gives it an opportunity to make progress that has proved difficult in the US.
A recent, though much-delayed, example of cross-industry collaboration between associations was Move 2.0, which saw the Outdoor Media Association, Media Federation of Australia (MFA) and its Outdoor Futures Council (OFC).
And it’s not the first time we’ve heard this.
Industry leaders consistently advocate for cross-functional collaboration, arguing that integrated teams deliver superior creative and commercial outcomes.
“I think the Australian market is doing a far better job than we are in the US of the trade associations working collaboratively together,” Cohen told B&T. “There is nothing that will set an industry back more than three versions of the ‘truth’.”
Cohen said the US has faced confusion when different industry associations issue competing guidance on the same topics. “In the US, when we have the marketer association, the agency association, the ANA and the IAB all issuing guidance on the same topic that’s different, the industry says ‘Well, which one do we pay attention to?’”
He said Australia’s collaborative approach on the other hand was “a great thing” and “a step in the right direction”.
But Cohen warned that agreement will mean little unless the industry begins to take action.
‘An absolute nightmare’
During his presentation, Cohen discussed the consequences of the current US privacy environment.
“It’s an absolute nightmare in the US,” he told the audiences. “More than 22 states having their own individual data privacy laws and no national or federal standard.”
While some states have similar approaches, Cohen said the system remains “terribly complicated”.
He also argued that the US needs greater enforcement to force the industry to take privacy and measurement issues more seriously.
“There hasn’t been a tremendous amount yet of enforcement,” he said on stage. “There’s been little enforcement, so as we all know, this industry goes along its merry way until you get the $10 million price tag or the enforcement action, and then everyone snaps to and starts paying attention.”
Cohen said “more enforcement actions are needed” to make the market pay attention.
He also warned against assuming that technology alone has solved the underlying privacy problem.
“Everyone thinks erroneously that, I’m using a clean room, okay, check the box, we have our privacy sorted, and we all know that’s not exactly the case,” he said on stage
His hope, he said, was that the US could eventually establish a national standard rather than continuing with a fragmented system that could inhibit industry growth.
What will happen if Aussies continue to hold off?
For Australian advertisers, Cohen said the danger of continuing to measure media in silos is ultimately about making poorer investment decisions.
Speaking to B&T, the CEO said media planning is fundamentally about understanding trade-offs: if an advertiser spends less in one area and more in another, what happens to the business?
But without an apples-to-apples comparison across different media, advertisers cannot make those decisions with confidence.
“If we don’t have a good sense of kind of an apples-to-apples comparison across linear television, and streaming, and creator, and commerce, then it’s going to be a missed opportunity in terms of investment,” he said.
“You’ll end up doing the same thing over and over again, and you’re not going to move where consumers are moving.”
In the short term, Cohen said this means inefficient media investment.
In the longer term, he warned that advertisers risk continuing to put money into channels simply because they cannot accurately understand the trade-offs between them.
“If we don’t adapt to where consumers are going, we’re going to be spending the same dollar to drive less results than we have in the past,” he said.
When asked what would happen to businesses that simply ignored the measurement problem, Cohen gave an unusually stark answer.
“I think that their business will suffer,” he said. “And I think that their marketing investment will not be as efficient as it could be.”
He added that, over time, companies could continue doing the same thing year after year because they lack the measurement needed to understand what they should change.
“And I think over time, you know, this is draconian, but they’ll go out of business.”
‘We get caught up in our underpants in the media world’
Cohen also took aim at the industry’s tendency to chase “the next big thing” while leaving fundamental measurement problems unresolved.
In his interview with B&T, he described advertising as a “shiny penny industry”, where marketers can become distracted by emerging technologies and trends before solving longstanding problems.
“One of the things that we suffer from in the industry is that we are a shiny penny industry,” he said. “We get very smitten with the new and the next, and we move off from things that we haven’t figured out already.”
He said the industry had been talking about measurement for years, but marketers were now moving on to “agentic AI, and generative AI, and creator, and commerce”.
“We just need to have some discipline around sorting out the measurement problems,” he said.
Cohen said the rapid development of AI could actually force the industry to accelerate its efforts.
“AI is moving like a locomotive train, super-duper fast, and we’re just going to get lost in the dust as an industry,” he said.
He argued that consumers were already moving faster than the advertising industry, with AI changing the way people behave and interact with businesses.
“If consumers are leading the way, as an industry, we have to follow suit.”
What are the big similarities between the two markets?
Despite the differences between the two markets, Cohen said Australia and the US are confronting essentially the same underlying measurement problem.
Speaking to B&T, he said individual media categories had become relatively good at measuring themselves.
“Linear television, CTV, social, print, out of home — all of those vertical categories have done a pretty good job of creating kind of like-for-like ways to compare things,” he said.
The problem comes when advertisers attempt to compare those channels horizontally.
“When you actually start talking about it horizontally across different platforms, it’s very hard to make an apples-to-apples comparison.”
Cohen highlighted US initiatives including Aquila, driven by the Association of National Advertisers, as attempts to address cross-media measurement.
But he said media owners who may not want their performance compared directly with other channels need to participate if these initiatives “if it’s going to work”.
“It needs to get the television broadcasters, the CTV players, the streamers, and the digital players to work together,” he said.
“Transparency is absolutely critical. Without that you don’t have anything.”
‘Everyone’s trying to take different bites of the apple’
Cohen said the frustration around measurement is now partly about the fact that the industry has been having the same conversation for years without making enough progress.
Asked by B&T why Australia’s review was happening now, Cohen said the industry was reaching the point where continuing to talk about the problem without moving forward was no longer enough.
“I think a bunch of us are getting tired of talking about the same thing year on year without us actually moving the needle forward,” he said.
He said IAB was attempting to identify areas where markets could collaborate globally, with measurement and AI among the issues that transcend individual countries.
“The stuff that’s going on with IAB Australia relative to measurement is just a culmination of let’s try this a different way,” he said.
That urgency also applies to the three measurement approaches highlighted by the Australian review: marketing mix modelling, attribution and incrementality.
Cohen said the US research showing just 39 percent of buy-side respondents using all three was “not a good thing”.
“I’d love for it to be something more like half to two thirds of advertisers,” he said.
Cohen argued that each approach provides a different source of insight and that marketers should be using more of the tools available to them.
He also warned that outcome-based measurement itself needs greater consistency, because different marketers can have very different definitions of what an “outcome” actually means.
“Everyone has a different definition of what an outcome is,” he said. “We’re trying to kind of standardise that as well.”
Ultimately, Cohen said Australia has an opportunity to move faster than the US because its industry bodies appear to be more aligned.
But the biggest challenge, according to him, is now turning that alignment into “some action”.
“I saw lots of nodding heads today. Now it’s just a question of taking the nodding heads and actually making it actionable and doing something.”
