By Charles Mathews. Attention metrics, full-funnel models, and unified dashboards are redefining how CMOs prove value. In Part 1, experts unpacked the metrics that resonate most with CFOs — and how CMOs can translate marketing’s impact into financial language. In Part 2, they explore the future of measurement, where culture, not just data, will determine which organisations win.
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Speaking the same language
Making a business case starts with translation, turning marketing concepts into financial language. “The business perspective for the C-suite is that performance is about measuring your current market demand, and brand-building is about measuring your market position. In your CFO’s world, performance is your cash flow, but brand-building is the assets on your balance sheet. Both play an important part in your business; both need to be tracked and valued. Often, we want to shift towards performance because we measure the immediate, tangible results. Still, we need to remember that those tangible results are being influenced by the intangible value that brand equity brings to the table,” says Isla Prentis, managing director of Marketing Intelligence Hub.
Chris Botha, group managing director at Park Advertising, argues for unified marketing mix modelling with incrementality layered in over time. “Traditional attribution systems were biased toward last-click or lower-funnel impressions. Marketing mix modelling, especially its unified, high-frequency, modern variants, captures a far broader context. This is important as we need to measure the whole effort, and not just pure performance. There are a variety of factors that brands can track, including brand love and affinity, awareness, and likelihood to purchase. These are critical. But here’s the trick, they are very often built over time. And they are often thrown out the window at the first sign of trouble in the sales department. I think more success will be found when a CEO’s success is measured over brand and sales metrics, over, let’s say, five years. That is when you can really start seeing whether what you are doing is working,” says Botha.
When sophistication doesn’t fit
Not every organisation needs the most complex model available, says Ryan Sauer, chief executive of Redwood Analytics. “We tend to default to marketing mix modelling for this model as it is sophisticated and robust. Truthfully though, very few brands are capable or require such a sophisticated model. I believe measuring business value will be achieved when a marketer defines the impact brand building will have before launching a campaign and does not try to cling to the business growth results achieved during the campaign. Marketers need to fortune-tell brand and direct-response marketing to their stakeholders before a campaign and then track whether they achieve it — that would be the most sophisticated model of marketing and would leave no doubt that business performance was engineered,” he says.
No ‘one fits all’ solution
Neil Pursey, product manager and board member at Maaten, recommends a tiered approach. “There’s not one model or metric to measure marketing’s business value. I would suggest that CMOs approach it with short-term and long-term goals in mind. Measuring effectiveness, brand, over the long term, and measuring efficiency – performance. Practically, that looks like causality measurement, taking into account all effects from brand marketing, economics, seasonality, price elasticity, and the like. And then more medium-term measurement, which requires a testing and experimentation culture to understand incremental effects of marketing campaigns and then attribution, which is short-term, weekly optimisation of CPMs, CTRs, traffic, and session duration,” he says.
Media inventory abundance has created a paradox: impressions keep growing, but human attention does not. The emerging metrics that justify premium placements measure attention rather than assumed exposure.
The attention premium
“Attention is a key metric that is often misunderstood. In much of the conversation about attention, we assume we need to maximise human attention, but we should rather optimise it. This relies on us becoming intentional about what type of attention we need based on the task at hand,” Prentis says.
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- The attention hunger games (Feb 2025)
The required attention varies by objective. “If we are trying to build a brand, the goal is to build memory structures using various emotions. It’s challenging to do this when the attention is fleeting. So in these cases, we need to look for longer, more active attention media. Also, remember that it gets even more nuanced than that. For example, building a new brand, launching a new positioning, or targeting a new audience will need closer attention than reinforcing current memory structures,” says Prentis.
Conversion requires different attention patterns. “On the other side of the consumer journey, you don’t necessarily need long attention to convert; well-timed fleeting attention can do the job. For example, conversion is about the right targeting to in-market consumers or the right timing and context when people require the product or service. And this becomes especially effective when we use a trigger, or distinctive asset, to unlock the intangible value of the brand built through those memory structures,” Prentis explains.
The implication for measurement is objective-based weighting. “With this context in place, we then start to realise that attention metrics should be set by objective, and this should be matched to the messaging that we allocate to each media placement. From a metric point of view, we can start to weight media metrics by attention or set minimum limits based on these objectives,” says Prentis.
Local attention benchmarks
Scott Reinders, chief operating officer of Connect, part of the Up&Up Group, points to local research that provides South African benchmarks. “Our Attention study with Karen Nelson-Field and her Amplified team gave us the first South African benchmarks for how much real human attention different platforms and formats deliver. The headline insight was simple: an ad being served does not mean it has been seen. Viewability is not enough. Completion rate is not enough. Human attention is the scarce resource we need to understand,” he says.
Three metrics enable attention-based buying. “Active attention seconds measures the number of seconds a human actually looks at an ad. It is the clearest indicator of exposure to quality. Our local benchmark data now allows South African brands to compare platforms based on human attention, not assumed exposure. Attention CPM reframes media buying from cost per impression to cost per second of real attention. When you normalise CPMs by attention, some cheap environments become very expensive, and some premium ones become surprisingly efficient. Mental availability uplift models link attention seconds to brand lift or conversion lift. We can now show the relationship between human attention and business outcomes instead of relying on proxy signals,” Reinders says.
The business case for premium environments becomes provable. “These metrics let CMOs justify paying a premium for quality inventory in well-thought-out media plans because they can prove that an attentive impression is materially more valuable than a passive or ignored one,” says Reinders.
Don’t discard premium contexts
Botha confirms the shift in planning practice. “Media planners are often in the same boat as the CMO, in that we are measured on sales, clicks, and conversions. This means that high-engagement media with loads of attention are thrown out the window because they are ‘expensive’. Astute marketers and agencies manage this well. Some of the metrics we are looking at include active attention seconds. Here, we optimise not for views but for verified human attention seconds. Then we have attention-adjusted reach. It shows that two media plans with ‘equal reach’ deliver wildly different business impact when you factor in human attention. Lastly, we also look at AttentionROAS, attention-weighted effectiveness. Our attention-weighted ROAS (return on advertising spend) proves premium environments deliver more profit per rand than low-cost, low-attention inventory. In an attention-scarce world, the metrics that matter are attention seconds, attention-adjusted reach, and attention-weighted ROAS. These prove that premium environments deliver more active, high-quality human attention,” Botha notes.
Sauer identifies long-form content as a quality signal. “Long-format content engagement and watch rates like podcast influencers and YouTuber sponsorships for me seem highly engaging, authentic, and aligned. The rise of ‘content slop’ produced by AI and served by AI algorithms will drive consumers to engage with high-quality human content, the metric is long-format watch rates and having media inventory intelligently crafted into that content, and it is hard to measure,” he says.
Pursey emphasises creative adaptation for platforms. “Focus on creative quality score and brand fluency on different channels. So often I see skippable ads on streaming channels like YouTube, and there is no mention or visual of the brand in the first 15 seconds. The problem is that marketers don’t always take a great idea and translate it effectively to the media platform. The problem with this is that marketers are buying for reach, but there is no attention to attention,” he says.
The ultimate dashboard
Designing a five-metric dashboard that combines immediate performance signals with leading indicators of brand health requires balancing comprehensiveness with focus. The experts converge on frameworks that track business value, demand signals, market position, quality, and efficiency.
Prentis advocates for composite measures over individual metrics. “Business context is everything, so this needs to be custom-built, but there are some guidelines that we can follow. First, we need to apply an overarching principle: track composite measures rather than individual measures. This is because they capture how metrics interact and correlate, providing a deeper understanding than the individual measures alone. There are then five categories that you should identify a composite measure for,” she says.
The five categories span the marketing value chain. “Commercial view: You want to track business performance alongside marketing measures to measure your ROI or ROAS ultimately. Demand signals: tracking search intent, website visits, basket activity, etc. This moves before sales move and shows the consumers’ intent. Market penetration: measure the percentage of category buyers who bought from you in the last period. Brand equity: you want to track this over time, but also remember it is slow-moving, you never want to react because there wasn’t movement week to week. Media conversion: this is where you identify your top media metrics based on performance KPIs,” says Prentis.
The integration challenge cannot be understated. “Identifying and unifying measures into composite tracking is where the challenge comes in, especially with different stakeholders involved and different platforms to track,” Prentis says.
Contextualise metrics
Reinders prioritises metrics that sit at the top of measurement frameworks. “It is not recommended to look at metrics in isolation. But if a CMO could only look at five metrics each week, they should prioritise the ones that sit at the top of any good measurement framework. The goal is to stay focused on business growth, not tactical noise,” he says.
His dashboard leads with customer value. “Customer lifetime value (CLV) or value per human. This metric keeps the organisation focused on attracting high-quality customers rather than quick wins. CLV also acts as a governor on performance spending because it tells you the true ceiling on what you can afford to pay for acquisition. Incremental revenue or profit contribution. This is the most direct measure of whether marketing is adding financial value. It blends brand and performance because both contribute to incremental lift. Share of search or Category interest. This is the pulse check for brand demand. It signals future growth and lets you spot problems early. aCPM or attention rate. This is a new quality metric. It helps identify wasted spend and ensures the plan is optimised for real human exposure rather than inflated impression counts. Cost per acquisition with blended funnel context. Still a staple. CPA shows efficiency, but only when interpreted with the full funnel in mind. Treating it as a weekly health check rather than the sole KPI keeps it honest,” Reinders says.
The framework positioning matters. “This five-part dashboard sits high in the super strategic area of our measurement framework. It cuts through the clutter of tactical metrics and anchors marketing in the language the C-suite should trust: growth, value, quality, and efficiency,” says Reinders.
The ultimate CMO dashboard
Botha acknowledges how difficult prioritisation can be, but suggests the following ultimate CMO dashboard: “I would go with: iROAS (are we driving revenue right now?); CPiC (cost per incremental conversion: are we doing it efficiently?); AAR (is our media planting real seeds?); mental availability (are we building long-term demand?); LTV:CAC (lifetime value and cost to acquire: are we attracting profitable customers for the future?),” he says.
Sauer offers an alternative configuration: “Category share of voice; average revenue per user (total revenue divided by total users); return on marketing investment (incremental sales times gross margin percentage, minus marketing costs, divided by marketing costs); cost per acquisition (cost of attributable marketing spend to a conversion); customer lifetime value,” he says.
Pursey’s dashboard emphasises reach, penetration and creative quality: “Reach; audience penetration; creative quality score; share of brand search; sales,” he says.
The path forward
The measurement revolution facing South African CMOs is not purely technical. It is cultural and strategic. The organisations that will thrive are those that reframe marketing from a cost centre to a growth engine, measured with the same rigour as any other profit-generating function.
Charles Lee Mathews is a senior editor to MarkLives MEDIA and a senior writer to MarkLives.com, as well as co-founder of The Writers, a writing consultancy.
