Smarter Media, Better Results: How Marketers Are Rethinking Media ROI
In today’s fragmented media landscape, marketing leaders face more pressure than ever to justify spend, measure impact, and unify strategy across channels and teams. At Setup, we frequently consult with marketers on how to demonstrate marketing’s value to the C-Suite.
Whether you’re managing campaigns for a national brand, a franchise QSR, or a B2B tech company, the challenge is the same: how do you build smarter media strategies that actually tie back to real business outcomes?
We spoke with top experts Scott Blessman, the VP of Analytics and Insights of Goodway Group, Elaine (Randant) Fowler, the Director of Omni-Channel Marketing at Sagepath Reply, and Laura Beaupre the President and Josh Perry the Digital Media Supervisor at Look Listen to dig into what’s working, what’s changing, and where media performance and analytics are headed next.
Meet the experts
VP of Analytics + Insights
Goodway Group
President
Look Listen
Digital Media Supervisor
Director of Omni-Channel Marketing
Sagepath Reply
Questions we posed to the experts:
What are the most common reasons brands can’t clearly connect media spend to ROI, and how do you help them fix that?
What role does first-party data play in improving media ROI, and how can brands better activate it?
When does it make sense for a brand to invest in advanced analytics, and what should they expect to gain?
How do you approach building a measurement strategy that goes beyond just last-click attribution?
What does a high-performing analytics + media collaboration look like between a brand and agency?
Why do franchise QSRs and retail chains struggle to unify cross-channel budgets?
What’s the secret to rapid, scalable performance campaigns without sacrificing brand consistency?
Q1 | What are the most common reasons brands can’t clearly connect media spend to ROI, and how do you help them fix that?
Many brands struggle to connect media spend to ROI due to fragmented data, poor tracking infrastructure, and a lack of clear KPIs or brand measurement strategies. Agencies like Sagepath, Goodway Group, and Look Listen address this by building unified data systems, predictive modeling tools, and transparent frameworks that reflect how consumers actually engage across touchpoints and enable more accurate, scalable performance insights.
Sagepath: Fragmented Data Sources: Many brands have multiple data sources, which can make it difficult to unify and analyze data holistically. We recommend starting with an audit of your data landscape, create a centralized storage and integration model and implement data governance to ensure data hygiene is upheld.
Poor Tracking Infrastructure: Incomplete or inaccurate tracking (missing UTM parameters, broken pixels, or lack of offline conversion tracking) can lead to gaps in marketing attribution. Developing a tagging and tracking strategy is just as important as the media plan.
Lack of Clear KPIs: It's so important to create well-defined goals prior to launching your media efforts so you can focus on and optimize toward what truly matters to the business.
Not Measuring Brand Efforts: Sometimes you are playing the long game. Brand efforts are not transactional, so measuring the impact is not black and white. It’s important to establish a baseline study of brand awareness and sentiment, then continue to measure changes over time. You won't see a shift overnight and need to understand that this is a long-term strategy, but still requires measurement to prove impact."
Goodway Group: Brands often fail to connect media spend to ROI because their campaigns are too generalized, their performance data is fragmented, or their media plans aren’t tailored to market-specific realities or personalized for the ideal customer profiles or personas. Goodway Group solves this by building predictive intelligence models and AI-driven scenario planning dashboards that simulate impact before spend — helping teams optimize budget allocation per objective and geography. The result?: clear line of sight between investment and outcome.
Look Listen: Tracking is the typical answer but it’s not that simple. Tracking digital footprints is becoming harder due to privacy restrictions, the slow demise of cookies, multiple systems, and cost. However, people don’t just interact with an ad or a website, they’re interacting with a brand across digital, traditional, word of mouth, walking down a street, etc and it’s impossible to track all of those interactions.
Media spend has a much larger impact than an ad click or post-impression engagement so we look broader than media spend. We start by auditing their existing tracking setup and metrics to establish a benchmark of current performance across all channels. We then implement as much tracking within a unified, closed-loop circuit as we can to obtain direct ROI, and have a transparent conversation to establish comfort level with the remaining correlation. We set clear expectations on launch dates, testing, and holistic marketing efforts, and compare performance over time against the benchmarks. It’s not a perfect science but neither is consumer behavior.
Q2 | What role does first-party data play in improving media ROI, and how can brands better activate it?
All three groups agreed that first-party data is essential to modern media performance, enabling precise targeting, stronger personalization, and higher ROI. This can be especially important when brands centralize their data, integrate it across platforms, and use it to directly inform campaign strategy and measurement.
Sagepath: First-party data is critical in meeting the needs of your current customers. Brands can leverage first-party data to improve personalization, increase marketing efficiency, better segment, and increase retention and overall lifetime value of a customer. To activate first-party data, it is increasingly important to have a plan to centralize, organize and govern your data. Understanding where you are starting and setting mini-milestones to measure progress across efficiency and growth over time is a great way to prove the impact first-party data is having on your marketing efforts.
Goodway Group: First-party data plays a central role in improving media ROI by enabling more precise targeting and measurement. At Goodway Group, tools like Passport One® help brands make better use of their data through privacy-conscious integration and closed-loop measurement. In commerce media environments, first-party data is applied using advanced segmentation and taxonomy strategies to support consistent activation across channels. To get the most from their data, brands should consider approaches like identity resolution, clean-room collaboration, and building segments that are directly tied to media planning and performance evaluation.
Look Listen: First-party data should be the foundation of effective media as it offers a direct line to understanding consumer behavior. It’s especially important in an increasingly privacy-centric world. Leveraging first-party data allows for enhanced targeting and personalization to provide your customers with relevant ads and a better experience, leading to higher engagement and conversions.
We’ve found incredible success integrating a CRM with ad platforms to activate first-party data. In particular, B2B brands with longer sales cycles, multiple touchpoints, and several key decision makers experience higher close rates when integrating systems to activate their data. It allows for tailored messaging, direct targeting as their prospects move through the sales funnel, effective media spend, and 1:1 tracking of engagement to sales.
Q3 | When does it make sense for a brand to invest in advanced analytics, and what should they expect to gain?
Brands should invest in advanced analytics when managing complex campaigns across geographies, long sales cycles, or scaling efforts to optimize their media strategy.
Goodway Group: Advanced analytics become essential when media dollars span multiple geographies, goals, and audiences — particularly in franchise or retail models. Brands should expect to gain the ability to scenario-model spend, justify investments more confidently, and make faster, data-informed decisions across both HQ and local teams.
Look Listen: There are a number of factors to consider when making the investment and it doesn’t make financial sense for everyone. The three biggest factors we consider are media spend, sales cycles, and intent to scale.
Having significant media spend can justify the investment - the higher the spend, the greater the potential impact of optimization. Additionally, with higher spend, there is more data to synthesize and act on.
Longer sales cycles have multiple touch points and more complex journeys. Leveraging a more advanced analytics system will tie together interactions over a longer period of time to prove ROI through a multi-touch attribution model.
If a brand is looking to scale their business either through new offerings or expansion of markets, it’s imperative that they invest in more advanced analytics so that they can prove a marketing plan is successful before implementing on a larger scale.
Q4 | How do you approach building a measurement strategy that goes beyond just last-click attribution?
Effective measurement strategies require mapping the full customer journey and using predictive models or intent-based touchpoints to gauge true channel impact, rather than relying on last-touch data that ignores broader brand engagement.
Goodway Group: We combine historical performance, channel-level inputs, geographic audience insights, and business objectives into predictive models. Rather than relying solely on last-touch metrics, we simulate scenarios that estimate the blended contribution of each channel toward desired outcomes, which better reflects real-world media performance.
Look Listen: Defining the customer journey is key to building a strategy. We need to understand the typical path and expected sales cycles from awareness to conversion. We then identify and track key, smaller touchpoints such as specific page views, downloading content, signing up for a newsletter, adding to cart, etc to show intent and how marketing impacts decisions over time.
Q5 | What does a high-performing analytics + media collaboration look like between a brand and agency?
The strongest brand-agency collaborations are built on shared goals, transparent communication, and integrated tools to allow teams to align, test, and optimize performance with full visibility into both media and business outcomes.
Goodway Group: First, it starts with understanding their business and how it defines success. We want to know what keeps them up at night and their biggest challenges to solve. From there, our recipe for success is no silos and no egos. We build shared tools, shared language, and shared accountability.
Especially when working with franchise and multi-location businesses, both HQ marketers and local operators or franchise owners used a centralized, AI-backed dashboard to test scenarios, simulate impact, and optimize mix. This mutual visibility aligned corporate strategy with local execution — a rare but powerful dynamic that ultimately doubled ROAS.
Look Listen: Trust, transparency, and collaboration as partners. We win collectively, not individually, and we need to work together to achieve shared goals. It’s critical that brands and agencies are fully committed to the same definition of goals and success not just for media but for business success. For example, the paid media goal may be qualified leads but ultimately the close sale is success for the business so we need to integrate high-performing analytics deeper into the journey past media. We maintain regular, strategic communication between media, broader marketing, and sales to ensure we’re supporting each step of the journey and sharing insights along the way.
Q6 | Why do franchise QSRs and retail chains struggle to unify cross-channel budgets?
Predictive tools and frameworks that translate central strategies into local actions help restore cohesion and impact.
Goodway Group: They operate across fragmented teams, goals, and tech stacks. Without a system to translate centralized strategy into localized action, budgets often get misaligned or underleveraged. We solve this by designing predictive models and decision-making tools that allow local markets to operate autonomously — but within a unified framework.
Q7 | What’s the secret to rapid, scalable performance campaigns without sacrificing brand consistency?
The key is empowering local teams with DMA-specific tools inside a centralized system that ensures strategic consistency.
Goodway Group: Build a system that empowers local teams without losing central control. We balanced autonomy and oversight by providing field operators with tools that customized media deployment by DMA — while maintaining strategic guardrails. That’s how you scale with precision.
Key Takeaways
Fragmented data and unclear KPIs are the biggest barriers to connecting media spend to ROI, and require a foundational reset in tracking, governance, and goal-setting.
First-party data is now non-negotiable for precise targeting, especially in a privacy-first world, and must be centralized, governed, and integrated into media activation.
Advanced analytics become essential when brands scale across geographies or have complex sales cycles, allowing for predictive planning and deeper performance insights.
High-performing brand-agency collaborations are built on shared goals, transparent data, and strategic alignment between HQ and local execution teams.
Franchise and retail brands that localize media strategies while maintaining centralized oversight see stronger returns, with AI-powered modeling unlocking double-digit ROAS gains.
The path to stronger media ROI isn’t simple and is only possible with the right strategy, structure, and support. The most effective marketers are building tighter connections between creative, data, and performance, letting real customer insights guide their investment. Whether it’s activating first-party data, deploying advanced analytics, or building local strategies at scale, the future of media success starts with smarter collaboration between brands and agencies.
Looking to improve your media strategy with expert support? Contact us to get in touch with one of these agencies, or to get guidance on next steps for you.
In today’s fragmented media landscape, marketing leaders face more pressure than ever to justify spend, measure impact, and unify strategy across channels and teams. Whether you’re managing campaigns for a national brand, a franchise QSR, or a B2B tech company, the challenge is the same: how do you build smarter media strategies that actually tie back to real business outcomes? We spoke with top experts from Sagepath, Goodway Group, and Look Listen to dig into what’s working, what’s changing, and where media performance and analytics are headed next.