It’s not a secret — nor an exaggeration — to say the news industry is at a critical crossroads, but INMA Advertising Initiative Lead Gabriel Dorosz offered reassuring news: Measurement is the lever that can shift its future.

“The market consistently undervalues premium publisher environments like news,” Dorosz said. “I believe strongly that advanced measurement is a way to correct that.”

However, there is a paradox with measurement: Advertisers believe it is essential but also believe it is flawed.

“So while everyone’s spending a lot of time on measurement, no one’s happy with the state of it right now,” Dorosz said. “And that creates both challenges and opportunities.”

During the INMA Advertising Measurement and Effectiveness Master Class, media leaders from Editora Globo, Financial Times, Casa Editorial El Tiempo, and Schibsted shared how their media companies are reimagining measurement in this shifting media landscape.

Editora Globo in the pressure of the performance era

Tiago Afonso, sales and digital development director of Editora Globo in Brazil, said the era of outcomes isn’t coming; it’s already here — and publishers are feeling the consequences. According to the 2025 CMO Survey, the top challenge for marketers is proving the financial impact of their work.

“Marketeers are already focusing on performance because they have to prove financial results and platforms can measure everything,” Afonso said.

The problem is performance media captures existing demand, not future demand. Publishers cannot win a battle fought solely on performance metrics; platforms have more data, more scale, and more sophisticated optimisation engines.

So Editora Globo chose a different arena: context, credibility, and attention. Afonso suggested publisher environments offer something platforms cannot replicate: intentional, immersive engagement.

“People are not just scrolling,” he said. When users enter a news environment, they come to read, learn, and spend time — conditions that are ideal for branded content and brand storytelling.

To capitalise on this, Editora Globo built a measurement system that mirrors the immediacy of platform dashboards but focuses on publisher strengths. For every branded content project, advertisers receive real‑time data on:

• Reach and impressions.
• Time spent.
• Brand awareness.
• Net Promoter Score (NPS).

New measurement frameworks at Financial Times

In the world of B2B advertising, a click is often the least useful thing a campaign can produce, Josh Ford, head of commercial innovation at the Financial Times, said.

There is friction that comes with introducing new measurement frameworks to advertisers, Ford said. Even clients who intellectually accept the limitations of click-through rates often fall back on CTR as the one metric they can use to compare publishers.

His advice was to start adjacent to existing KPIs rather than replacing them outright, introduce new metrics as additional insights within established reports, and build toward them using case studies and correlated evidence.

Are buyers actually asking for attention measurement?

It’s mixed, Ford said: “What’s right for one advertiser isn’t right for everyone.”

The most successful conversations, he noted, have happened where clients already had some openness to looking beyond clicks, and where the FT could show incremental improvements in a metric the client already tracked.

Measurement strategy is ultimately a client-category question. B2B and long-cycle consumer categories like automotive call for a different toolkit than fast-moving consumer goods. Publishers should be matching their measurement approach to the buying behaviour of their advertisers’ customers, not applying a single framework universally.

Ford closed with a summary that distilled his argument to its clearest form: “Direct attribution of performance will always be difficult, but prioritising marketing fundamentals over clicks gives advertisers the best opportunity to drive future demand.”

Connecting audiences to outcomes at El Tiempo

For more than 10 years, the Colombian media group Casa Editorial El Tiempo has been quietly building a data infrastructure that now allows it to do something many publishers still struggle with: connect audiences not just to impressions but to outcomes.

That distinction between reaching users and identifying those ready to act has become the foundation of El Tiempo’s approach. The company rebuilt its core infrastructure, migrating to a customer data platform, upgrading its data management capabilities, integrating universal IDs, and introducing data cleanrooms to enable secure collaboration with partners.

The result is not just more data, but better data — structured, unified, and actionable.

“We mix all this together … resulting in more than 15 million enriched audiences,” Diego Vallejo, chief digital officer, said. “By enriched audiences, I mean these unified customer profiles.”

Rather than chasing scale, the company has focused on efficiency. That efficiency reshapes the value proposition on both sides. Advertisers gain more precise targeting and higher conversion potential, while users encounter fewer irrelevant messages.

“For the users, there’s less noise, more relevant ads, and then more meaningful interaction,” Vallejo said.

In that sense, better performance is not just a commercial advantage, but also a user experience improvement. The company’s commercial offering reflects this evolution.

Maximising media effectiveness at Schibsted

How do news media organisations move from reach and metrics to actual documented impact? Line Arneberg, strategic insights manager for Norwegian media company Schibsted, began by sharing the methodological backbone of how the company measures impact.

• Cookie-matched panels.
• Control/exposed design.
• Benchmark databases.
• Direct campaigns only.

“The methodologies range from lightweight brand tracking to advanced control exposed studies, and cross format impact analysis,” Arneberg shared. “Our campaign testing is based on cookie-matched panels through our research partner, which is Neurstadt.”

Users of Schibsted’s Norwegian and Swedish Web sites are matched with panelists using first-party cookies. Campaigns are delivered through Sander and reported in Ad Market, where clients can actually monitor performance in a live dashboard.

“Data is uploaded real-time and includes metrics such as impressions, CTRs, frequency, viewability, estimated reach, and frequency,” she added. “This allows both us and our clients to monitor the campaign while it’s running.”

With reach, they focus on measuring unique people rather than unique users, rather than multiple cookies generated by the same person on different devices and sites. Using Neurstadt, they can estimate the overlap between devices and sites that allow them to calculate the number of unique individuals reached.

. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .