Connecting with customers and measuring impact

This is the third and final article in our series on key challenges faced by today’s marketeers. While the first article focused on identifying growth opportunities and the second on balancing brand building with short-term KPIs, this final piece explores how media strategy is evolving to deliver both performance and meaningful customer connections.

Owned and paid media: better together

Media is not just a cost, it’s a strategic asset. At the UBA session, CMOs highlighted the importance of combining owned and paid media effectively. Owned media, like websites and apps, allows for high personalisation and controlled engagement with existing customers. Paid media remains vital for reaching new audiences and driving brand awareness beyond existing customer bases.

To succeed, marketers need to treat owned and paid media as complementary. This means integrating both into a cohesive plan, using owned channels for deep engagement and paid for broad exposure. The challenge lies in integrating owned and paid media so they work together seamlessly, which requires balancing brand-building messages with sales-driven content.

Segmentation drives relevance

Reaching the right audience with the right message always starts with smart segmentation. This is a critical part of the process. Personalisation can be more sophisticated in owned media than in paid media, tailoring experiences to customer profiles, location, behaviour or product use. This level of personalisation requires tight collaboration between marketing, IT, and data teams. It also relies on combining hard data with softer insights, such as customer personas and journey mapping.

Message first, then medium

A key takeaway from the session was the importance of sequencing: start with what the brand needs to say, then choose where and how to say it, and only then adapt the message to fit the channel. This sequencing allows for coherence while still enabling optimisation by channel.

AI tools are playing a growing role in this process, helping to match message and medium more effectively. AI also allows to scale creative variations, adapt content for different platforms, and support faster decision-making. But AI is not a substitute for human insight. CMOs agreed that human creativity and judgement remain essential in making final decisions and ensuring that the creative and the channel truly work together.

Cross-media measurement

Despite advances in tools and platforms, measuring media performance remains a major challenge. Media complementarity, in a context of hyper-fragmentation of the media, is one of the biggest frustrations among CMOs because of the difficulty understanding the combined impact of channels like, for instance, total video and social media. The lack of robust cross-media measurement makes it difficult to see the full picture and understand true impact. The group reiterated its strong demand for tools that can unify reach and frequency optimisation across channels, with a trusted cross-media measurement approach.

Another major issue for CMOs is the proliferation of touchpoints from multiple media sales houses that leads to decision fatigue and complexity. Due to this fragmentation of media and touchpoint choices, decisions often default to cost-based choices rather than strategic impact.

Connecting with purpose

To conclude, CMOs stressed the need to move beyond purely cost-based decisions and consider the broader value of supporting local media.. Local media investments can contribute to the health of the market and the wider economy, but they require strong performance standards to be viable.

The consensus was that media can and should do more than deliver impressions. It should create meaningful connections between brands and consumers, align seamlessly with brand messaging, and be measured in ways that reflect both commercial returns and broader societal impact. Achieving this will require better integration between channels, more sophisticated measurement tools, and a strategic commitment to balancing reach, relevance, and responsibility.

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