For much of the history of advertising, marketers dreamed about being able to quickly and accurately measure how their ads were affecting sales. But measuring ads by outcomes — which is to say, incremental sales lift — is not only now a possibility, but increasingly the standard by which all advertising is measured.
The urge to measure everything down to bottom-line dollars and cents is so strong that it has even extended to television, the ad channel once considered the hallowed ground of brand-building. So-called “performance TV” promises to combine all of the top-of-the-funnel brand awareness TV has always provided with the conversion tracking of low-funnel ad channels.
Just last week, Netflix, which is relatively new to the ad game, launched its conversion API (CAPI), a feature “designed to help advertisers prove outcomes,” Netflix said in its announcement. In doing so, Netflix joins Roku, which recently released a CAPI of its own. Nielsen, the company that pioneered measuring TV ads, is also trying to get in on the outcomes game — Nielsen last month announced Nielsen One, a cross-platform analytics dashboard filled with more than 200 audience segments. The segments are means to more outcome-based measurement.
“We’re seeing a huge shift to outcomes,” Ellie Pryor, VP of global audiences and identity at Nielsen, told AdExchanger about the launch. “What I hear from clients is that audiences are a proxy for outcomes,” she said. “The reason you care about an audience is because you believe it will have an outsize effect on driving a certain outcome for your business.”
Indeed, outcomes have been the most important metric for ad buyers since 2024, according to survey results from advertising industry trade group IAB.
Major ad platforms Meta, Google and Snap have long had CAPIs, but as outcomes have become the expected means of measurement for many brands, smaller platforms have been releasing CAPIs to remain competitive. LinkedIn released its CAPI last year, for instance.
That TV — the channel whose entire allure for marketers was that it was a more prestigious alternative to performance-based direct response marketing — is embracing outcomes is telling. It signals not only the supremacy of outcome-base measurement, but a massive contraction of the marketing funnel more generally.
If a TV ad can simultaneously achieve both brand awareness at the top of the funnel and conversions at the bottom of the funnel, is there really a marketing funnel at all? (The question reads like the Zen koan, “What is the sound of one hand clapping?”)
Nowhere is the collapsing of the marketing funnel more evident than in the nascent AI chatbot advertising industry. OpenAI introduced ads into its industry-leading chatbot ChatGPT last month. While it’s still early, it’s apparent that chatbot ads combine the search, discovery, consideration and outcome components of the funnel into a single function. A user can query the chatbot about a vacation, be served ads for flight, lodging and activity options, and have the chat agent execute purchase for all phases of the trip, all with a single command. The marketing funnel, which was once a months- or years-long process, involving messaging consumers across an array of ad channels, collapses in on itself, like an infinitely dense black hole.
Though it’s unlikely that chatbots will ever replace screened entertainment, so TV’s role in the advertising mix is safe for now. In fact, with performance TV, and the merging of outcome-based measurement with TV’s unparalleled creative canvas and capacity for building awareness, the golden era of TV advertising might be in the near future.
