Insights teams are under more pressure than ever. They are being asked to measure more campaigns, move faster, support more sales conversations, and do it all with the same or fewer resources than they had a few years ago. The gap between what teams are asked to deliver and what they can realistically execute is real, and it is widening.
That tension was the backdrop for a recent AdExchanger webinar DISQO hosted, "How Insights Teams Win Back Time and Show Full-Funnel Impact." Shari Sternbach, Director of Research and Insights at KARGO, joined the conversation as a panelist and spoke candidly about how her team has evolved from post-campaign report delivery into a function that shapes strategy, drives revenue, and scales measurement across advertisers of every size.
Her perspective is grounded in the daily realities of a fast-moving ad tech environment, where speed, accuracy, and impact have to coexist. Here is what she had to say.
Advertisers are looking beyond delivery. They want to see the direct impact campaigns are having on their business. It is not just about getting the right creatives in front of the right audiences anymore. We need to show how that translates into measurable outcomes and, going a step further, how we bring those learnings into the next planning cycle.
It is coming from all directions at once: advertisers, our sales team, leadership, and, I would add a fourth source, the industry itself. Working in ad tech means capabilities and client needs are constantly evolving, and measurement has to keep up. Everyone is moving faster. Timelines are compressing for everything from RFP responses to report delivery.
It can almost feel like a race. If you slow down, you fall behind. If you go too fast, you risk crashing. The real challenge is finding the balance between speed, accuracy, and impact. That balance is everything.
Winning means being a core piece of client success at every phase, not just the team that delivers post-campaign reporting. We have moved into acting as a strategic partner to sales and clients, being embedded in revenue conversations, and delivering insights that influence media strategy rather than just validating it.
Winning also means scaling measurement to support more advertisers through that strategic journey together, so that we are measuring most campaigns, not just the high-budget ones.
A lot of time was going toward digging through data. Understanding performance drivers and optimization levers is essential work, but getting down to that level of granularity took real time. Now, with AI surfacing that information directly in a dashboard, we spend less time figuring out what to show and more time weaving the data into a cohesive narrative and surfacing genuine optimization opportunities.
Longer turnaround times meant it took longer to get insights into clients' hands. And we are rarely looking at research in isolation. We build alongside our client-facing and analytics teams, bringing study learnings together with performance metrics to give a more holistic view of how a campaign performed. If research does not keep pace with that process, we risk slowing the whole thing down.
Having that level of insight at our fingertips has been invaluable for enabling better conversations. The introduction of the free self-serve tool has been a major value add, specifically. It lets us cut down on turnaround times by doing more ourselves, but it also opens up an entirely new entry point for smaller brands that previously were not being supported with research. Advertisers of any size can now see the value of their media dollars.
It is changing how an insights team shows up within an organization. We are a crucial piece of driving revenue, but we are also influencing strategic decisions and helping the business understand performance across different channels, formats, and targeting tactics with an additional layer of meaningful data. The function has more weight internally than it ever has.
It is really a balance. Having a full-service team at your disposal takes a lot of the operational weight off your plate and gives you an outside perspective with additional expertise, but it does require giving up some of the control that comes with doing it yourself.
We have found that self-serve works as an excellent complement. We lean on managed service when we have larger plans, outcomes-based goals, or custom KPIs where we benefit from more support. We use self-serve when we need something quick-turn or lower cost. Having both options available means we are never stuck waiting.
Adding the Outcomes piece was a big unlock. Getting behavioral metrics is a significant step forward in showing the consumer journey beyond the ad itself. It complements brand lift really well by taking us past consideration and into action: searching for more information, visiting a site, going to an e-commerce platform to shop. That is something advertisers genuinely value right now, and the reaction from our clients has been very positive.
I would focus more on predictive measurement and building deeper integrations. The goal is to close the feedback loop between measurement and planning so that we are not just capturing what is happening in a campaign, but using those signals to influence where ads should go next and continuously optimize toward the strongest outcomes.
It goes beyond just being involved. It is about feeling empowered to be a key decision maker when you have the insights and expertise to back that up. That means being in the room with clients more, working alongside those teams, and crafting more longitudinal insights. We are not looking at a campaign as one-and-done anymore. We are building partnerships with advertisers so that we grow toward their goals together.
The amount of research we are doing has definitely increased, both to meet client demand and to validate internally that what we are doing with our creatives and tactics is working. But you need the receipts to back that up. Clicks and views do not tell the full story of campaign performance.
Providing brand metrics is a great way to show advertisers what we are doing for them on a deeper level. And it is an easy entry point to scaling ad research across the organization because it applies across so many different verticals and campaign sizes. If anything, the internal pressure is wanting more insights and more research, which is the heart of the conversation the whole industry is having right now.
It means that we can be better collaborators within Kargo. Whether it’s partnering more closely with sales, media strategy, and client services to infuse insights into every step of the campaign lifecycle or using that time to work with product marketing to look across studies to extract normative insights so that we can understand where Kargo is excelling on CTV, digital, and social, using a data-backed narrative.
Advertisers value when you bring them insights, and they are getting more sophisticated in their expectations. That absolutely gives the research team more of a seat at the table. It helps drive incremental revenue when advertisers want to see strong performance continue, and it supports renewals by giving us the ability to put insights and recommendations into action for the next campaign.
It comes back to finding new ways to leverage data and complete the feedback loop. Having results post-campaign is great. Having them in-flight is even better. But the real question is: how do we optimize continuously toward desired outcomes in real time and keep measuring that performance? That is how insights become a strategic growth driver for the business, not just a reporting function that validates what already happened.