The IAB’s 2025 Creator Economy report shows creator marketing has become a full-fledged media channel—one projected to reach $37.1 billion in spend next year, growing 26% YoY and outpacing the broader ad market by a factor of four. Nearly half of advertisers now call creators a must-buy, yet workflows remain fragmented across budgets, discovery tools, and measurement systems. With AI accelerating both production and complexity, the report lays out the emerging mandate: treat creator marketing as its own discipline with centralized budgets, standardized vetting, unified measurement, and formal AI governance. For marketers, real performance now requires real structure.

At the Marketecture conference, MiQ’s global VP of strategy and partnerships, Moe Chughtai, said advertisers are finally connecting platforms like Meta, YouTube, and TV through clean room technologies that enable unified measurement. Traditional marketing mix models are being replaced by one- to three-month measurement cycles that allow for real-time optimization and smarter KPI alignment. The result: advertisers can move beyond isolated reporting and toward integrated, cross-platform performance strategies that strengthen confidence in ROI.

The ad industry has reached a tipping point in its approach to measurement, shifting from a slower, siloed approach to one that’s more dynamic and allows advertisers to shift their spending more quickly than they had in years past.

Marketing measurement is entering a new phase of speed and precision. InMarket’s Michael Della Penna told EMARKETER that marketers are moving beyond static reports toward real-time insights—fusing marketing mix modeling (MMM) and multi-touch attribution (MTA) to understand what drives incremental sales as campaigns run. AI-powered models now forecast lift, optimize spend, and connect awareness to conversion through unified platforms. With 56% of marketers prioritizing sales lift and nearly half investing in MMM, the focus is clear: decision speed over dashboards. InMarket’s end-to-end system exemplifies this shift, reframing measurement as a continuous feedback loop rather than a quarterly report.

Nearly half (46.9%) of US brand and agency marketers plan to invest in marketing mix modeling (MMM) over the next year, according to a July survey from EMARKETER and TransUnion.

Privacy regulations are mounting. Signal loss is accelerating. Omnichannel advertising has become impossibly complex. These forces are driving marketers back to MMM for holistic, privacy-safe measurement.

Incrementality has always been the holy grail of retail media. But lately, it’s taken on greater importance as ad budgets are squeezed and retail media networks (RMNs) fight for their share of ad dollars.

GenAI search is gaining traction, but not all consumers are seeking out the conversational experiences that will eventually disrupt the search ad market.

It’s been about a month since Google made its marketing mix model (MMM) tool, Meridian, available to the public, igniting a debate about whether open-source MMM is the way to go or if marketers should stick to vendor’s proprietary tools. Of course, the answer isn’t that simple. The effectiveness of these tools can depend on organization size and resources, customization needs, and cost. Here’s a breakdown of the pros and cons of each to help make the process a bit easier.

Google made its marketing mix model (MMM), Meridian, available to the public last week and launched a program of over 20 trained and certified measurement partners to help marketers use the tool.

An increasingly fragmented retail media ecosystem has made it difficult for advertisers to track campaign performance across multiple retail media networks (RMNs), said Liz Roche, vice president of measurement and media at Albertsons Media Collective.

Marketers are tuning their targeting strategies for a 2025 where cookies remain in limbo, media mix modeling (MMM) usage expands, and experimentation with AI continues.

61.4% of US marketers who spend $500,000 or more per year on digital advertising want better/faster media mix modeling (MMM) to upgrade their measurement strategies, according to a July 2024 study from EMARKETER and Snap Inc.

Marketers believe MMM is the best type of measurement for identifying drivers of business outcomes, according to a July 2024 survey EMARKETER conducted with Snap.

As marketers attempt to piece together a full, nuanced picture of how their paid media affects outcomes, old-fashioned measurement tactics are coming back into vogue, and new players are rising to prominence.

Advertising on Facebook has become more challenging due to Apple’s AppTrackingTransparency framework in iOS 14.5. Here’s how advertisers are adapting their strategies in the post-IDFA reality.

Attributing revenues to marketing touchpoints is one of marketers’ most challenging yet vital tasks. Read on to learn how marketers are approaching the journey to holistic attribution.

Our two-part attribution series focuses on holistic attribution. It explores best practices for implementing attribution at the organizational level and balancing channel- and company-level KPIs.

Holistic attribution is a must if companies want to understand the incremental effects of their marketing efforts on business KPIs. But how do firms balance business KPIs with their channel-level ones? We share tips and best practices.