For advertising strategies to thrive in the changing media landscape, media companies must focus on demonstrating outcomes and competing with platforms.

In the final session of the INMA Advertising Measurement and Effectiveness Master Class, media leaders from Trustmedia, and Ozone, and Nine shared how their companies are translating measurement into commercial results, while INMA Advertising Initiative Lead Gabriel Dorosz presented a plan to help publishers navigate the rapidly evolving world of advertising measurement.

A four‑stage road map for publishers

Acknowledging the increasing complexity of the landscape, Dorosz ended the virtual event by asking the same three questions he had posed on the first day: What should publishers invest in? Where do they realistically start? And what will clients and agencies actually care about?

“These, as you told me, were the most important things to answer,” he said. “To answer the questions of what to do and what to invest in, we can break this down into eight possibilities.”

• Attention measurement.
• Brand lift.
• Attribution and incrementality.
• Clean rooms and second‑party data matching.
• Performance advertising.
• Marketing mix modeling.
• Custom metrics.
• Proprietary and syndicated research.

To help publishers prioritise where to start, Dorosz distilled the eight options into a four‑stage maturity model:

• Stage 1: Industry research + custom metrics. “Any publisher can do this. There’s no new data required. You can build on your existing reporting and improve your reports, your storytelling, and your go-to-market.”
• Stage 2: Brand lift + attention. “Prioritise brand lift first and then bring in attention, but they’re useful in combination. Explore partnerships and adoption roadmaps… integrate with existing digital metrics, and aggregate these into storytelling.”
• Stage 3: Attribution, incrementality, clean rooms, performance advertising. “These are all best with mature first-party data and measurement infrastructure,” he reminded. “So if you’re in that position or if you’re headed there, you should very much explore pilots and partners for these kinds of options.”
• Stage 4: MMM presence. “This doesn’t necessarily require two and three, but it does require significant individual reach or collective publisher scale and clean data,” Dorosz explained. “But again, [it is] also increasingly becoming the standard.”

Dorosz gave master class attendees a pointed warning: there’s no time for publishers to wait to take action.

“Not to bring us down, but this is really, really important,” he said. “We will increasingly see more and more share of the market going to the big platforms if publishers don’t course correct.”

Trustmedia creates an automated campaign reporting system

At Trustmedia, the advertising sales house of Belgium-based Mediafin, a project began with a clear mission.

“We wanted to create an automated campaign reporting system tailor-made to the needs of both clients and agencies,” Katrien Berte, data project manager at Trustmedia, said.

The team defined three key decision criteria: full automation, layout flexibility, and the ability to filter data by campaign.

Excel, though limited in visual design, met all three criteria.

“We were actually inspired by a quote that our CEO often uses,” Berte said. “He says, ‘Don’t wait for the Rolls-Royce. To start, you can use a secondhand BMW as well.’”

The Excel report is organised across multiple tabs. The opening pages pull from Google Ad Manager and cover the main campaign overview: impressions, viewable impressions, clicks, CTR, and viewable CTR.

Trustmedia began sending automated reports to its sales team in February of 2026. When a campaign ends, the system sends the report directly to sales’ mailboxes. For campaigns going back up to a year, sales can also regenerate older reports to inform future conversations with clients.

Planned additions include attention data from DoubleVerify. The team is also looking at pulling data directly from the booking system, including sold versus delivered impressions, campaign pricing, and selected target groups, as well as adding creative screenshots and expanding DMP-sourced audience data.

On AI, Trustmedia had already launched TrustIQ, an internal tool nominated for an INMA Global Media Award, that processes sales briefings and recommendations from over 330 audience segments, Sven Lybaert, head of digital and agencies, said: “Next step will be, we have that data on point as well, now let’s also have a summary.”

Ozone finds scalable success in crowded ad landscape

In today’s media landscape, getting and keeping the attention of your audience is paramount. Publishers have and continue to have competition with massive social media and tech giants like Meta, Google, and TikTok.

Ozone is a digital advertising platform or “an audience connection platform,” fully owned by news publishers — News UK, The Guardian, Telegraph, and Reach.

“Our goal is to drive incremental impact for brands and incremental revenue for publishers, and this distinction is key as to how we approach measurement in a platform-driven market,” Dipti Patel, senior director/publisher development, said.

The first layer of measurement Ozone tracks is scale.

“Many underestimate the combined impact of publisher audiences, and it’s our job to show them how collectively we can compete,” Craig Tuck, chief revenue officer, said.

At Ozone, scale is critical to the audience incrementally. Consider daily and monthly audience reach across big platforms such as TikTok, Instagram, and Facebook beyond vanity metrics. The key is to have a healthy mix of media.

Additionally, “every measure we offer is independently verified, third-party validated or built transparently from signals that buyers themselves have told us they trust,” Tuck said.

Contrarily, other platforms typically design their own methodology for advertisers and buyers, and may lack transparency.

Ozone’s platform approach to publisher performance is designed to create value for publishers by amplifying and complementing their existing portfolio of brands. By focusing on campaigns tied to client needs and real business initiatives, the advertising platform has found scalable success amidst a crowded advertising landscape.

Modernising workflows for an outcome-driven future at Nine

Stephanie Drabble, director of digital product commercialisation & strategy at Nine in Australia, outlined three primary challenges the team has faced: restricted access to data, legislation and consumer changes, and AI and zero-click search.

Drabble said she views these challenges with a “glass half full” lens: “It’s an opportunity to redefine measures of success, to move away from a hyper-fixation on the bottom-of-funnel performance metrics and to start to actually credit the different channels that are involved in driving the outcome.”

In addition to these changes, Nine has faced historical limitations in tracking outcomes and proving effectiveness.

• Lack of authentication across a large portion of assets.
• Fragmented ad-tech ecosystem resulting in lack of unified display solution and overreliance on cookies and device IDs.
• Market behaviours with ad tech intermediaries building cross-publisher targeting and measurement solutions.

Drabble went on to discuss the solutions that Nine has come up with to meet these challenges.

• Lack of authentication: Implemented unified identity resolution software to create a persistent identifier for unauthenticated profiles, tying them back to existing user IDs to significantly improve measurement and tracking of anonymous users.

• Fragmented ad-tech ecosystem: Established a first-party data ecosystem with a consolidated view of the consumer across the breadth of Nine’s assets, enhancing targeting and measurement capabilities.

• Market behaviours: Shifted from surface-level clicks to deeper business outcomes and outcome-based reporting.

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