We estimate that this year, the average US adult will spend almost 48% of their digital media time with mobile apps—more than a quarter of total media time. The rise of CTV has meant only more digital time spent in cookieless environments.

The result could be media mix modeling focused on lookalike targeting and more nimble campaign executions. But TV remains the largest medium for engagement, with almost double the amount of daily time as digital video. For large branding aims, TV remains an important medium for advertising reach.

In addition, 33% were using customer ID resolution programs for attribution analysis, 31% to identify and address wasted marketing spend, 28% for media mix modeling, and 3% for all of the above (and more).

Retail media has revolutionized the search ad market, where most of the focus still is. But display and video ads that target consumers higher in the funnel are becoming a more important part of the mix, and technological innovation is ushering in new ad products that bring together the best of branding and the best of performance marketing.

US programmatic display ad spending was up more than 10% in 2020 despite the pandemic-induced recession and will rebound this year as advertisers continue shifting budgets to flexible, measurable media.

The survey also found advertisers expect a number of measurement and research techniques to become more important in a cookieless world, including sales-lift research, ad effectiveness research, and media mix modeling.

“Things are quite affordable at the moment, and we also have a lot of people consuming a lot of media,” said Jon Schulz, CMO of demand-side platform Viant. “Those two don't tend to go in the same direction, and it creates a unique opportunity to get our brand out there.”.

The most advanced way of modeling attribution is a holistic one that includes not just bottom-up multitouch attribution, but also a top-down, marketing-mix-modeling approach. This allows for the planning of media budgets, as well as a better view of incrementality than multitouch attribution alone can provide.

Unlike media mix modeling, where investments can be measured in a very scientific way, social listening is “more anecdotal,” Viden of CommonSpirit Health said. “I don't know that I could put a number on it, but I do know the value of it.

Holistic attribution, defined as the ability to understand how marketing and nonmarketing touchpoints influenced a specific business outcome, is a must for measuring marketing’s true impact in today’s extremely competitive and fragmented media world. But with less than 10% of companies capable of attributing holistically, it’s early days. Why are so few companies doing holistic attribution?

The future of measurement lies in weaving the best of marketing mix modeling and multitouch attribution into a unified analytics solution.

Influencer marketing is an important part of the marketing mix for most companies, especially those in the retail space. A survey conducted last September by Forbes Insights found that 30.5% of companies worldwide are increasing their focus on influencers as part of the advertising media mix.

Nearly 50% of CMOs say their companies do not have a unified measurement approach across offline and online media, according to a survey from The CMO Club and Catalina Marketing. Catalina shares four ways to use multitouch attribution to uncover actionable insights.