There’s long been a begrudging acceptance of the ad tech industry's complexity. Its crowded landscape of point solutions has helped the ecosystem mature (worth $783 billion globally in 2024) but it has also deepened fragmentation. Retail media, and more broadly commerce media, has become a dominant force over the past five years, fueled by the promise of deterministic purchase data. Yet ironically, it has further splintered the landscape, introducing new walled gardens for marketers to navigate.
Jeff Zifrony, VP of Strategy at Attain, has spent his career measuring ROI for advertisers. Prior to Attain, he led the Advertising Research function in the US at Twitter/X. Zifrony has been closely involved in the development of OutcomeHQ, Attain's full-stack media optimization platform. The latest version of the platform launched on July 15, aiming to streamline the complex landscape using Attain's first-party purchase data.
OutcomeHQ combines insights, audiences, and measurement into one interface, with the goal of making marketing workflows more connected, efficient, and accountable to business outcomes. Historically, each phase of a campaign has been siloed, and many teams within brand and agency organizations have been structured accordingly. As marketers and technologies have advanced, team lines are also starting to blur – media strategy is consulting programmatic, creatives are looking to insights and analytics to inform their decisions.
“Ultimately, the objective of every marketer is to drive sales. At the end of the day, that is their job, both in the short and long term. Building technology and intelligence around that live sales data provides insight into behavior that they just haven't had in the past. The applications are kind of endless,” said Zifrony.
Every campaign begins with market research, which has long relied on qualitative surveys, focus groups, and months-long engagements. The methodology is rigorous, but the memories and opinions of humans, less so. “We know from tons of academic research, people don't do what they say they'll do,” said Zifrony.
By starting with actual purchase behavior, OutcomeHQ enables marketers to build audiences around recent, deterministic signals: what people are buying, rather than what they claim they might.
“You can see who’s moving or switching from another brand, are they switching entirely out of the category? Are they switching to a lower cost alternative? Are they switching to a healthier alternative? It gives strategists a very recent understanding of the world and then allows them to plan media accordingly,” said Zifrony.
That visibility spans across verticals. “We see agencies wanting to pair a QSR wing shop with what type of cell phone their target is most likely to buy,” says Zifrony. “It’s allowing them to design new marketing strategies and tailor messages to consumers in ways that are highly personal.”
Once audiences are defined, Attain enables advertisers to activate them instantly through “One Click Audiences” that push segments directly into demand-side platforms.
“In the past, you build an insight, you put it into a deck. You then make an audience recommendation. That entire process can take weeks. We have taken that multi-week process and shrunk it down to a matter of minutes or seconds,” said Zifrony.
Because the platform is built on deterministic purchase data, the audience-building process is intended to be more transparent. Prior to the availability of large-scale first-party data, advertisers often worked with multiple third-party vendors to approximate segments, typically with limited visibility into quality or sourcing. As a result, many marketers relied on performance metrics like click-through rates (CTR) to gauge success, despite not always understanding the drivers behind them.
OutcomeHQ measures audiences and corresponding sales performance in-flight, enabling advertisers to refine targeting and creative during the campaign, rather than relying solely on proxy indicators such as clicks.“The industry has gotten by on media KPIs and things that ultimately don't impact the bottom line through a variety of correlation analyses that are not causal,” said Zifrony.
The platform is also designed to support audience optimization using in-flight sales measurement. For example, advertisers can create net-new segments to reach those who have converted in-flight and retarget them with a new message, or use a different message for those who have been exposed but have not converted. This approach differs from longstanding sales measurement tools, which often focus on post-campaign analysis and involve complex methodologies that offer limited opportunities for rapid optimization.
“An insight for the sake of an insight doesn't matter,” said Zifrony. “An insight for the sake of actionability is what marketers ultimately care about. And we've closed that gap where historically there was a leap.”
