Reinforcing Brand Equity in 2025

Unpacking holistic brand measurement strategies

As marketers prepare for 2025, the focus is sharper than ever: making every marketing dollar count while fostering meaningful, lasting connections with customers. Economic volatility and growing competition mean brands must align their strategies with measurable outcomes and a deeper understanding of their audiences.

During DISQO’s 2025 Consumer Trends Webinar with Adweek, Jenna Irwin of Ovative Group shared insights into how brands can navigate these demands. From leveraging holistic data strategies to balancing brand and performance goals to refining cross-platform approaches for CTV and beyond, she emphasizes specific steps for delivering results that resonate with businesses and their customers.

Q: Ovative focuses on driving measurable business impact for its clients. How does its approach to holistic measurement and marketing performance reflect this mission?

At Ovative, our approach to holistic measurement is central to our mission of transforming how we evaluate marketing success. As part of the measurement team, I’m closely involved in this initiative, which revolves around our proprietary Enterprise Marketing Return (EMR) framework. 

EMR is a comprehensive metric that evaluates all media investments equally, measuring their impact on three critical business outcomes: driving profitable enterprise revenue, building a healthy customer file, and enhancing brand equity.

This approach allows us to precisely assess marketing performance, ensuring our clients can make informed decisions that align with their broader business goals. My role enables me to combine my passion for data with Ovative’s mission, fearlessly unlocking our clients’ potential. 

Q: What feedback are you receiving from advertisers about their strategies for navigating 2025?

We can categorize advertisers' 2025 challenges into two areas: those beyond our control, like economic volatility and its effects on consumer confidence and spending, and those within our control, where marketers can take specific steps. While the broader economy remains uncertain, marketers can maximize the impact of limited budgets in a landscape where brand loyalty is increasingly fragile.

I’m particularly optimistic about 2025's potential to be transformative for customer-centric marketing strategies. The more deeply brands and retailers understand their customers—within specific industries and demographics—the more effectively they can allocate resources and create meaningful connections. By delivering thoughtful, genuine experiences, advertisers can better capture attention and build loyalty even in competitive markets.

I’m also hopeful for a resurgence in testing as a foundational strategy. In a noisy and complex environment, testing can provide the clarity needed to refine approaches and uncover insights. It’s a powerful way to reduce uncertainty, enabling marketers to adapt and thrive amidst challenges.

Q: What advice do you give clients to help them navigate economic concerns and manage this volatility effectively?

Successfully addressing economic volatility requires a customer-centric approach to marketing. Building strong purchase consideration by authentically connecting with your audience—through products, messaging, and creative—is essential. By ensuring that you purposefully direct every marketing dollar, you can mitigate waste and create meaningful connections, even when budgets are tight.

We also emphasize the importance of having the correct data to plan, buy, measure, and optimize media. A cohesive, data-driven strategy enables brands to make informed decisions that align with their goals. Additionally, we advise clients to measure marketing efforts by focusing on the bottom line. This includes considering margin impact, incorporating the costs of promotions aimed at price-conscious consumers, and ensuring marketing investments don’t erode profitability.

Finally, testing remains a cornerstone of our recommendations. Testing strategies consistently provide the insights needed to refine approaches and ensure effectiveness in dynamic economic environments.

Q: CTV continues to grow in prominence. How important is a digital mindset when setting CTV ad strategies, and how do traditional reach and frequency approaches fit into today’s planning?

CTV’s growth extends beyond a fleeting trend—it has firmly established itself as a critical component of media strategies. As consumers increasingly shift to connected devices, we’ve seen our clients allocate more of their budgets to CTV. Its versatility is key, as it can effectively support campaigns across the entire funnel, from awareness to conversion, using various tactics.

A digital mindset is essential in leveraging the addressable components of CTV. These capabilities, including customer data and precise targeting, enable brands to adopt a highly strategic and data-focused approach. Second-screen behavior—where viewers engage with multiple devices while watching CTV—requires brands to develop a seamless, 360-degree media strategy. This ensures consistent and impactful brand presence across the funnel and various screens as consumers interact with content.

While digital strategies are critical, traditional reach and frequency metrics remain vital for planning and evaluating CTV performance, especially for advertisers balancing CTV with linear television. This combination ensures a cohesive approach that maximizes reach and optimizes performance across platforms.

Q: The balance between brand and performance has been a key topic in 2024. Do you expect this focus to continue in 2025, and how are you helping clients manage these objectives?

Cultivating the right balance between brand and performance will remain a priority well into 2025 and beyond. This challenge is becoming increasingly complex as new platforms and inventory opportunities emerge. At Ovative, we help clients navigate this dynamic in two ways.

First, we emphasize testing as a means to provide clarity. For instance, we recently conducted an in-market geo test for a retailer aiming to demonstrate the financial value of brand media to their finance team. While brand health metrics are important, the objective was to prove how improving these metrics leads to measurable financial impact. The results showed that increasing upper-funnel investment enabled the retailer to profitably scale their marketing efforts and improve the efficiency of their lower-funnel media. Testing like this helps address skepticism and reinforces the role of brand investment within a comprehensive marketing strategy.

Second, we advocate for a comprehensive metric to evaluate media performance holistically. For example, Ovative’s EMR accounts for online and in-store sales, immediate and future impact, and customer value and health. This metric allows for an apples-to-apples comparison across the funnel, enabling informed, full-funnel investment decisions aligning with brand and performance objectives.

Q: How can brands and agencies navigate evolving measurement complexities to maximize the impact of their campaigns in 2025?

One of the key challenges in measurement remains translating softer metrics—such as brand perception, loyalty, and retention—into an understanding of their long-term financial impact. These elements are crucial for monitoring brand health, but linking them directly to measurable outcomes is complex for marketers.

At Ovative, we address this by combining brand health measurement with in-market testing. Using platforms like DISQO, we keep a pulse on brand health while evaluating the lift generated by specific campaigns, creatives, partners, and platforms. This allows us to analyze how these activities influence brand perception and link these insights to financial outcomes.

However, this process requires patience, as the payoff from improving brand health often unfolds over an extended period. The challenge lies in effectively measuring these relationships and communicating their value. Despite the complexity, working at this intersection of brand and financial impact is an exciting opportunity for deeper insights and strategic growth.

Q: With the rapid shift toward digital and CTV, what measurement challenges are your clients facing, and what are their expectations?

One of the most significant challenges in CTV is understanding the long-term payback of investments. Early indicators of success are essential for identifying campaigns with the potential to deliver future financial value. These insights enable media operators to optimize in real-time, ensuring effective resource allocation to maximize performance. Clients expect us to bridge the gap between these early signals and strategies, delivering innovative, data-driven adjustments that enhance their returns.

Another key focus is on customer-centricity. Clients increasingly want to understand how their media investments drive customer acquisition, reactivation, retention, and overall customer value. This is why our Marketing Mix Modeling (MMM) platform, Modern MMM+ by EMRge^TM,  incorporates both revenue and customer models. By integrating these perspectives, we can measure media dollars' immediate impact while assessing how customers contribute to long-term organizational growth. This holistic approach gives clients a comprehensive view of their media performance and its role in driving sustainable success.

Q: How are media companies and agencies differentiating themselves with data-driven capabilities? Is it more important to leverage proprietary data sets, integrate with clients’ deterministic first-party data, or combine these with other data sources?

Both approaches are essential. A robust data strategy begins with maximizing the value of the data you already possess. Augmenting this with high-quality third-party data to address gaps ensures a more complete and actionable view.

At Ovative, we strongly advocate integrating these data sources into a unified reporting framework. We do so through our proprietary MarTech platform, EMRge, which unifies data in one place as a single source of truth. By collectively analyzing first- and third-party data, brands gain a holistic understanding of performance. This comprehensive approach enables better decision-making and enhances the ability to drive meaningful results.

Q: How has DISQO’s fully consented, identity-based platform supported Ovative Group in measuring performance across platforms and throughout the funnel? What value drove your decision to partner with DISQO?

Actionable data starts with trustworthy data. Without confidence in its accuracy and integrity, data cannot drive meaningful decisions. DISQO’s fully consented, identity-based approach provides a strong foundation for reliable measurement, enabling us to analyze performance across platforms and the entire marketing funnel confidently.

As a data-focused organization, we seek partners who share our commitment to rigorous methodologies. DISQO’s approach aligns with this philosophy, allowing us to deliver credible insights and move swiftly from analysis to action. This partnership has been instrumental in helping us provide our clients with the tools and confidence they need to make impactful decisions and achieve results.

Q: What are the most significant challenges in understanding ad effectiveness and measurement, and how can the industry collaborate to address these issues?

One of the most pressing challenges is demonstrating the long-term and halo effects of media investments. Questions such as how much to allocate to brand initiatives and how long to sustain significant campaign moments remain difficult to answer precisely.

We need to collaborate on integrating first- and third-party data to address these issues. Combining data sources and applying advanced analytics can create stronger connections between brand health and the long-term financial impact of media investments. By aligning efforts and resources, we can better understand how media activities influence consumer behavior over time and develop more comprehensive measurement strategies.

While solving this challenge is complex, it represents an exciting opportunity to advance how we measure and optimize advertising effectiveness.