For years, upper-funnel brand media has relied on metrics like awareness, reach, and recall. Those are useful indicators within marketing, but they rarely translate to useful metrics for a CFO or finance team.
When economic pressure hits, budgets often get reallocated to tactics that show faster, more tangible returns. The short-term gain comes at the expense of long-term growth because the brand-building engine that feeds the funnel slows down. Over time, a vicious cycle is created: weaker brand presence leads to weaker performance, which leads to even deeper cuts the next time budgets are reviewed.
The outcomes era has changed that equation permanently. For the first time, we can tie upper-funnel activity to something the business universally understands: sales.
This development creates a shared language for valuing advertising investments from the very first impression through to the final conversion. It gives brand-building work a place in the same measurement framework that governs performance marketing, bringing it into the conversations that determine budget, strategy, and growth.
More Than Just Performance
The outcomes era is often confused as the extension (or intensification) of the industry's fixation on short-term performance. It's actually quite the opposite.
The "era" of outcomes is the broad consequence of the large volumes of transaction data that have recently entered the media ecosystem, from direct consumer sources at the wallet level and from retailers and other commercial entities where people spend money.
Transaction data has quickly become a viable, widely available basis for media planning, measurement, and exchange. It makes it possible to view the entire customer journey through the lens of actual purchase behavior.
Working With the Data We Already Have
The introduction of transaction data does not replace the metrics marketers already use. Engagement data, behavioral data, demographic data, and attitudinal data remain essential. In fact, outcomes make them more valuable by reconciling them against the one source of truth the entire organization recognizes.
Every impression, every lift in preference, every engagement can now be tied back to the company's core performance language. Our existing metrics become more important, not less.
The availability of transaction data has created a Rosetta Stone moment for marketing measurement. All the signals that once lived in separate silos—from brand lift studies to site visits to clickthrough rates—can now be understood in the same context. That context is revenue, and it applies equally to upper-, mid-, and lower-funnel activity.
The result is a clearer picture of what drives growth and how each stage of the funnel contributes to it.
What It Means Across the Table
For CMOs, it means being able to defend upper-funnel spend with hard numbers that hold up under financial scrutiny. It strengthens their position in budget negotiations, helps preserve long-term strategies during downturns, and supports a more balanced mix of brand and performance investment.
For CFOs, it reframes brand activity as an investment with a measurable return, rather than a discretionary cost to be trimmed when times get tough. Transaction-backed evidence allows them to weigh brand dollars alongside performance spend using the same criteria, leading to smarter, more sustainable media plans.
For agencies, it ensures the high-margin business of brand building retains its place in the plan. It also safeguards some of the industry's best creative work—the large-scale, high-visibility campaigns that have historically been the first to go when budgets tighten.
For creatives, it provides proof of impact in the same financial terms as bottom-funnel tactics, making it easier to justify bold ideas and long-term storytelling. Work that was once defended on intuition or precedent can now be backed by evidence tied directly to sales.
Even traditional channels like linear TV, out-of-home, and broadcast stand to benefit. Historically harder to link directly to sales, they can now sit alongside digital channels in the same transaction-based measurement framework. The result: the door opens to more integrated, cross-channel strategies, and it's easier to demonstrate the value of media that reaches audiences at scale.
A Cultural Shift for the Industry
This shift promises to resolve many of the tensions that have defined marketing for decades: CMO vs. CFO. Brand vs. agency. Performance teams vs. brand teams. Media vs. creative.
When everyone works from the same source of truth, the focus moves from defending budgets to growing them.
The outcomes era replaces instinct and inference with a shared evidentiary base. It sharpens the "fuzzy" edges of marketing into clear, defensible proof. The benefits reach every part of the value chain and promote a healthier, more realistic balance across the funnel.
That is why outcomes are not just a dataset and not just an objective. They are truly an era, one that will define how the industry operates for years to come.
