Legacy measurement is no longer sufficient for capturing the many ways today’s consumers engage with brands.
That was the clearest takeaway from the #AWNY panel I joined this past week alongside Disney Advertising’s Dana McGraw, the National Football League (NFL)'s Paul Ballew , and Keurig Dr Pepper Inc.’s Drew Panayiotou.
Convergent TV has become how we watch our favorite shows. Audiences move seamlessly across linear, streaming, live, on-demand, and digital platforms. And in that environment, TV isn’t doing either brand work or performance work — it’s doing both, often in the same moment. Modern measurement must catch up with that reality.
For decades, TV measurement was held back by what we couldn’t see. We focused on top-of-funnel proxies like reach or awareness, or we stretched for bottom-funnel results that were easy to over-credit or under-report, depending on confounding variables and artificial assumptions. But that middle ground — measuring real consumer engagement that signals brand consideration, intent, and loyalty — was unseen and unmeasurable. And that led to the Catch-22 of planning on one thing – reach – and judging on another – results. That’s no longer necessary.
Increasingly, marketers are turning to mid-funnel predictive signals for TV outcomes — like search engagement, website visits, and app downloads. These fast, scalable signals are proven to be investment-grade, and they're giving us the clearest window yet into how our TV investments are actually working. And they’re available and most importantly fair to both the buyers and sellers.
For example, Dr Pepper could ask media owners like Disney to validate the effectiveness of its live sports investment with EDO TV outcomes data, which found that its ads generated 80% stronger engagement during last year’s College Football Playoff National Championship than the average soda ad did the rest of the year.
As consumer behavior continues to shift, brands, agencies, media companies, and creators are developing new frameworks that capture engagement wherever it occurs. Keurig Dr Pepper’s Drew Panayiotou framed this challenge as part of an evolution from a traditional funnel to a flywheel. As he put it, “There are things that we want to do that are deterministic, that drive performance and show the value of sales, but the other half of that is about how the brand is being present and connecting to culture.”
Meanwhile, the NFL’s Paul Ballew noted that the league is also investing in understanding its fans across platforms, with the goal of deepening engagement and building relationships rather than merely counting viewers.
“Are we thinking about attribution correctly?”
That was the smart provocation Disney’s Dana McGraw put to us. We must think beyond any single definition of success or any static measurement framework. As the Convergent TV ecosystem gets more complex, we must be innovative and agile in our approach to defining value. Leadership from streaming giants like Disney sets a high bar — pushing us all toward a more robust, multi-dimensional measurement framework.
And the next frontier in this evolution will be powered by AI — and not just the fun and flash of ChatGPT but systems purpose-built on Vertical AI models and software like EDO's. These systems are programmed not just to analyze data, but to understand the context of marketing, media, and consumer behavior. We envisioned EDO as a Vertical AI software company when we started over a decade ago, processing trillions of data points – data sets too large and noisy to be viewed as anything other than exhaust from the media and advertising industrial complex before we applied our Vertical AI models to them – to detect signal within dynamic behavioral baselines for tens of thousands of brands around the clock.
As Paul from the NFL put it plainly: “Smart AI requires smart data.” When marketers combine proven predictive signals with the right Vertical AI technology, they’re able to transcend broken measurement frameworks and develop new solutions for the Convergent TV era. The limitations of the past are gone — it’s on us to build what comes next.