The expectations placed on insights teams have fundamentally shifted. Where advertisers once asked media companies to prove they delivered what was bought, they now want proof that campaigns delivered what was needed. That is a different question entirely, and it requires a different kind of team to answer it.
Shannon Ferguson, Director of Measurement at The Weather Company, was one of the panelists who joined DISQO for a recent AdExchanger webinar, "How Insights Teams Win Back Time and Show Full-Funnel Impact." Shannon has been at the forefront of reshaping what measurement means for a publisher, moving her team away from static monthly decks and post-campaign retrospectives toward continuous, in-flight intelligence that informs decisions while there is still time to act on them.
Her central argument is that, at its best, the measurement function is not a reporting function at all. It is a decision-enabling engine. Here is how she got there.
The shift is from "prove you delivered what I bought" to "prove you delivered what I needed," and those are fundamentally different questions. Historically, advertisers wanted accountability for the media plan: Did my ads run? Did they reach the right people? Did I get the impressions I paid for? That was table stakes for trust.
Now the expectation has evolved into outcomes accountability. Advertisers are asking whether campaigns actually moved their business forward, and critically, how they know, and what they should do differently next time. The conversation has moved from delivery to impact.
All three: advertisers, sales teams, and leadership. And speed is the common thread in every direction. Advertisers do not want a perfect readout 90 days after a campaign ends. They want directional signals in-flight so they can optimize. The expectation is shifting from post-campaign reporting to real-time learning systems, where the team can say what is working while there is still time to do something about it.
As a publisher, we cannot just be great at selling and delivering advertising anymore. We have to be great at closing the loop between exposure and outcome, doing it in ways that respect privacy, work across fragmented platforms, and deliver insights fast enough to be genuinely actionable.
For us, it is less about depth of analysis and more about speed of influence. I look at it three ways.
The first is operating at decision speed, not report speed. We have stepped away from monthly or quarterly decks. Now everything is embedded in live campaign workflows where we can surface signals when there is still time to act. We do not just report on what happened. We prescribe what to do next, with enough specificity on creative and placement that client teams can immediately optimize.
The second is democratizing insights rather than hoarding them. We are building systems where anyone who is client-facing can pull the core insights they need without waiting for an analyst to walk them through it. The team's value is not gatekeeping information. It is curating the questions worth asking and the frameworks for answering them.
The third is driving product and innovation, not just measurement. We are in the room early when new ad products are being designed, using insights to shape what gets built rather than just evaluate what already exists. We sit within the revenue-generation arm of the organization, not a support function.
A lot of it was discrepancy reports, tracking sheets, and back-and-forth emails with third-party collaborators. There was a significant lag time built into almost every measurement collaboration. The team was spending time managing the process rather than generating insight. We were not able to optimize in real time. That is the honest answer. What we have now are tools that are real-time, predictive, interactive, and outcome-oriented by default. That has been the unlock.
Yes, and it required fundamentally rethinking what insight work actually means: from retrospective to predictive, from batch reporting to continuous learning, from static decks to dynamic systems. That shift changed how I think about the team's role entirely. We are not in the measurement business anymore. We are in the decision-enablement business. And that requires completely different infrastructure, skillsets, and speed.
We are having real conversations in real time about what is driving the business forward. We can look across the full funnel by creative, placement, platform, and demographic. All the filters are there for us to optimize as campaigns run. The granularity that used to take days to surface is now available when it actually matters.
Revenue, learnings, and time savings, but what matters most is how it is changing what insights mean internally. The team is not just running studies anymore. We are building learning agendas with clients, developing hypotheses we test together across multiple campaigns. That shift from service function to strategic collaborator has changed everything about how the team operates and how it is perceived.
The relationship needs to be collaborative enough that the vendor understands your clients' businesses deeply, not just deliver technically accurate data. With DISQO, turnaround times actually match decision-speed needs. Outputs are client-ready, not just technically correct. And our internal team stays strategically engaged rather than spending time on operational coordination.
Moving from ad hoc, post-campaign brand studies to continuous, in-flight brand lift tracking powered by DISQO's always-on methodology was the pivotal change. That shift gave us the ability to act on data while it was still relevant, which is a completely different kind of value than retrospective reporting.
We are now involved in every conversation from the first RFP through to the wrap deck, presenting alongside our team to clients in person. That kind of end-to-end presence was not always possible when the team was buried in operational work. Being at the table throughout the full campaign lifecycle changes the quality of the relationship and the depth of trust advertisers place in the recommendations we make.
Yes, significantly more, thanks to several different factors. We know advertisers are always interested in sales impact, outcomes, and incremental lift, but we also know as marketers, that branding plays a critical role at the bottom of the funnel. The opportunity is to bring the brand back into that conversation and make it tangible, not just directional.
We are having more conversations in general, both incremental conversations as campaigns run and renewal conversations once they end. When we see strong lift in certain areas, we surface that to advertisers in real time. That visibility drives mid-campaign investment conversations that simply were not happening before.
A team that operates at decision speed rather than report speed. A team that democratizes insights across the organization instead of centralizing them. And a team that drives product and innovation, not just measurement. The function that earns its seat at every strategic table is the one that shapes what gets built next, not just the one that evaluates what already ran.