In today’s post third-party cookie world at a time when fragmentation is growing and concerns about identity loss, security around measurement and brand safety are accelerating, the rise of marketing that leads with measurable business outcomes is clear.
Even so, across much of the industry, expectation is outpacing readiness. In the light of this, how can and should brands take best advantage of outcomes marketing’s potential?
We asked Ozone’s senior director of growth, Tom Harrison.
Built by the UK’s leading publishers, Ozone is a digital advertising business. Its Audience Connection Platform – designed to combine human connections at scale with creative and deep audience intelligence – connects brands with engaged audiences in trusted online environments to deliver measurable business impact.
Tom joined Ozone last November after two decades spent working in agency roles, most recently as Omnicom Media Group UK’s head of outcomes.
How did the time you spent in agency roles shape your view of what advertisers are looking for?
In my experience, what advertisers need and want today is what they’ve always needed and wanted: effectiveness – delivery on business goals, efficiency – ability to achieve this in a frictionless way, and transparency – a feedback loop so they know what worked and why.
Those needs haven’t changed. What has is the complexity standing in the way of meeting them.
Over the years, the introduction of many new layers in advertising, planning and delivery led to proxy media metrics with little direct connection to business outcomes – number of clicks does not equate to volume of sales, to take one obvious example.
As a result, there were many who benefited from this complexity and extracted rather than drove value for the advertiser.
Why has outcomes-based delivery now become such a priority?
Complexity, financial pressures and geopolitical uncertainty have driven up interest in accountability and performance. But performance marketing as a term isn’t very useful because as everything has to deliver, everything is performance marketing to an extent.
An outcomes driven approach is about delivering against goals more closely aligned with what specific outcomes a business is trying to achieve, rather than just a proxy media metric, however.
So, interest in outcomes models is being driven by everything that fuels close scrutiny of every marketing pound spent and the emergence of new technologies – tools like AI models, for example, which now enable us to optimise to outcomes in real time.
Where do you think current approaches to outcomes are falling short?
Historically, infrastructure has not been set up to deliver against outcomes – in programmatic, especially. This has fuelled an over focus on proxy media metrics.
Effectiveness depends on a flow of data in terms of sales and conversions coming from the client side that AI models can be trained on. But this is contingent on collaboration between all – client, agency, media and technology partners.
When it comes to measuring success, what is now needed is a re-setting of the baselines for success that the industry uses. And that’s what I truly hope the growing focus on outcomes, combined with the new outcomes capability that Ozone is now rolling out, will deliver.
With scrutiny on measurement growing, what do advertisers need to confidently prove impact?
Understanding an audience properly at scale and communicating with them in those environments where they’re most engaged is always going to deliver results more effectively.
Effectiveness depends on having a single view of the customer at scale and ensuring each media touchpoint is measured for incrementality. As not many businesses have the consistent audience taxonomy required to deliver this, a large volume – about 70% – of ad spend currently goes to four or five main platforms globally.
These four or five platforms all have a single customer view. They aren’t reliant on cookies. And their closed ecosystems mean they can attribute success effectively.
What advertisers now need are more solutions that provide credible competitive alternatives to these main platforms.
Ozone’s Audience Connection Platform provides a single view with significant reach – nine in ten of the UK’s adult online population and half a billion globally – with a platform built on publisher first-party data. That’s a powerful alternative environment to social media.
Why do you think there has been some bad press around outcomes and performance?
Outcomes models are sometimes associated with principal trading and that association has shaped some of the narrative around them.
Principal trading isn't inherently problematic. It can simply mean a buyer taking a risk position on an investment in exchange for a commercial advantage, and there are legitimate reasons why the economics aren't always fully visible. Publishing a rate openly, for instance, could set a new market floor and erode the cost advantage being sought in the first place.
The challenge is that where commercial models lack transparency, it creates uncertainty – and that uncertainty has sometimes overshadowed what outcomes-based approaches can genuinely deliver.
Looking ahead, what can we expect in terms of next developments this year?
Generally, we expect growth in outcomes models throughout 2026 and beyond. This will impact multiple media channels, with outcome marketing further extending beyond its traditional roots in digital display and video into channels such as social, CTV and connected audio.
As outcomes-based media delivery becomes the norm, we expect advertisers will be able to reassess the value of other channels, such as display, too. There will be a pivot to new metrics and it will be interesting to see which channels grow off the back of this.
Specifically, Ozone will further leverage its scale and creative capability with the gradual release in coming months of our new outcomes business, Arc, which draws together our full outcomes capability.
Across the industry, major agency holding groups all offer their own outcomes solutions. Arc is intended to enable and complement these rather than compete with them. Currently, we are stress-testing Arc with clients and we’re excited about what we’re already seeing both in terms of learnings and results.
If you could make one change to the industry narrative around outcomes-based campaigns, what would it be?
The assumption that quality must be traded for conversion. We believe that quality and conversion can both be achieved – it doesn’t have to be an either or – and that a general movement away from media proxies and our work here at Ozone will prove it.