Marketers should think twice about investing in a raft of “unnecessary” AI adtech and martech tools flooding the market. They should also not forget that legacy media is often more effective than social media platforms in delivering short and longer term value.
Those are the key messages from Ebiquity’s global chief executive Ruben Schreurs, whose consultancy helps brands, including 75 of the 100 largest, make better decisions about media and marketing investments.
Schreurs, who caught up with B&T in Sydney this week, believes marketers need to establish the right foundations and systems to get the most out of tech because the majority of legacy tools across are under-utilised.
“There’s a lot of noise, a lot of unnecessary partners, tools and data sitting in organisations that creates clutter and causes people and businesses to lose track of what really matters. “In some organisations that is being compounded by the rapid innovation and adoption of AI,” he said.
“Companies need to build them into the overall system to deliver against the right objectives rather than create a whole new parallel universe in which you have a bunch of agentic AI systems doing things that don’t really build up towards the expected output.”
Schreurs believes that marketing and media, especially with the rise of investment in adtech and social media platforms, has “lost sense of the basics” such as high quality reach and the value of broadcast media, which is under-indexed.
“This is a highly unpopular thing to propagate, but it’s something that we continuously show, is that the highest incremental ROI can be delivered from print and broadcast TV,” he said.
“Yet advertising dollars and focus in marketing organisations continuously move towards these kinds of shiny new objects and platforms without there being solid proof that they deliver on the investment in the way that legacy media channels do.”
A short-term sugar hit
The reason why marketers are focusing investment on social media and tech platforms is multi-layered. Schreurs said that marketers find it challenging to isolate and prove the long-term impact of advertising investments.
“Our 2024 profitability study (see charts throughout this piece) showed is that the short term average short term incremental profit ROI of advertising across channels is 1.87 but the average total term profit ROI incremental profit ROI is 4.22. So that delta of what is it 2. 25 in ROI points is difficult or impossible for most marketers to prove,” he said.
“That automatically then prioritises channels that provide you with more short term indicators of “success”, which often isn’t incremental.
“When we look at platform sales attribution data, it’s very often not isolated for incrementality, meaning many of those attributed conversions or sales events or value points would have been delivered regardless of advertising, but still they’re attributed to certain platforms.”
This means that the impact of brand advertising on building brand equity and salience over the long term is not being included in decision-making.
The Dutchman, who became the global CEO of Ebiquity in 2024, says that the industry is now geared towards short-term metrics, which is a dangerous game to play for most brands.
“If you are a sports betting company or a Netflix or Amazon Prime, you own the end-to-end consumer journey so have very accurate lifetime value measurement of your customers,” he said.
“But most FMCG companies’ distribution goes through retail and e-commerce where they don’t have the data to actively and accurately model that, so they don’t factor in the value of long-term brand equity building.”
Another factor is eyeball scarcity. As younger generations shift their media consumption to different environments, such as social media, marketers are following the eyeballs.
“These platforms absolutely have merit and you can optimise, they can deliver fantastic returns, but the way that the returns are being measured in many cases are either incorrect or incomplete,” he said.
“That’s causing an over indexation on these newer digital platforms, even though the proof and the evidence is that large scale broadcast, out of home activations, sports sponsorships, linear TV is so impactful.”
‘Highly unoptimised’
Schreurs has spent 16 years working in marketing and media and joined Ebiquity in 2020 following the acquisition of Digital Decisions BV, a digital media monitoring and optimisation business he founded. He remains perplexed why more marketers don’t question the results being reported by walled gardens that mark their own homework.
“This is concerning because we are talking about a global market worth US$1.15 trillion in 2026, which is a similar size to GDP of Switzerland, that remains highly unoptimised,” he said.
“Measurement investment decisions are across the board not that sophisticated or mature, and this is one prime example of, you know, the lack of rigour in demanding that kind of evidence or proof against the investments.
“I don’t have the answer to why. What I do know is that there is an absolute acceleration now towards the adoption, and you know, more institutional embedding of marketing mix modelling within decision making around media allocations, which is a very positive thing. The introduction of AI allows for mid-sized brands to engage in this measurement capability.”
Schreurs called out the likes of Mutinex and Tracksuit as Aussie companies that are leading the charge on adtech innovation in a positive way. Although MMM tools are now widely accessible, he but urged caution about using free MMM tools.
He added: “MMM, and also incrementality testing, geo testing, that’s the way to get this evidence in place, and we see the adoption growing exponentially now. So there’s a lot of momentum behind that, which is driven by a frustration of marketers of not knowing what the actual incremental impact is of their investments in certain channels.
“The good thing is that there’s an appetite both from the marketing side and the finance and C-level in organisations to understand each other better.”
A downward spiral
Marketers that are being asked to do more with lower budgets and resources are in a difficult spot and Schreurs believes this mindset is having a perverse effect on advertising effectiveness.
“This notion of doing more with less is counterproductive. Buying cheaper media tends to be way worse in terms of its actual impact on building a brand and delivering incremental sales and breaking into new households. Yet, on paper, it looks like our media is getting cheaper,” he said.
“Doing more with less is not delivering more attentive, high quality, impactful exposures to consumers at a better price, it’s just vanity metrics that make it look like it’s being done more efficiently than before.”
To overcome this problem, Schreurs believes marketers should focus on outcomes, such as targets around competitive market share, household penetration or volume growth.
“Marketers need to invest in the right places and get the incentives aligned for everyone, internally and externally, that’s working with them. For example, most agency performance-related fees or bonus schemes used to be based on year-on-year cost savings, so cheaper media,” he said. “They weren’t built around improvements in competitive market share or household penetration objectives that drive real growth.
“Marketers need to stop using the wrong metrics as a proxy for delivering against objectives. You need to have the right metric, and then focus on growth based on that metric.”
In other words, invest in the advertising and media that will deliver sustainable growth and business outcomes, rather than opting for cheaper media and short-term sugar hits.
