MPiQ Talk: Making sense of the data torrent to drive media effectiveness

Across the marketing ecosystem, investment in data continues to accelerate. The ambition is straightforward: better data should enable more relevant, more efficient, and more measurable marketing outcomes.

At the recent MPiQ conference in London, Dan Brown, SVP, Client Strategy at mediasense, spoke to a room of around 200 marketers across brands and agencies on the topic – alongside Nelleke Van Der Voort, Global Procurement Manager for Creative, Media and AdTech at Jacobs Douwe Egberts. Their session, Making Sense of the Data Torrent to Drive Media Effectiveness, focused less on the promise of data – and more on the reality of making it work.

The Data Ownership-Effectiveness Gap

Having any data at all versus none yields significant, genuinely additive benefits. However, in practice, many brands already have a torrent of data, and a multitude of tools at their disposal. The real issue is bridging the gap between data ownership and data effectiveness.

In our experience, that gap tends to show up in a few consistent ways:

1. Cost vs value: Whether the incremental value extracted from data exceeds the incremental cost of acquiring and managing it
2. Reach vs targeting: The extent to which sacrificing reach for targeting improves media effectiveness
3. Tools and partners: Choosing best-fit and best-in-class tools and data vendors
4. Data quality: Whether the underlying data quality is genuinely fit for purpose
5. Measuring effectiveness: Understanding the incremental impact of data

The reality is that data solutions are now embedded across the entire marketing stack. AI has only accelerated this—introducing new layers of capability, but also new layers of cost, complexity, and opacity. The presence of more tools does not inherently lead to better decisions.

What’s required is a more disciplined approach to understanding cause and effect.

Assessing Data Effectiveness

Both Dan and Nelleke emphasised that advertisers are in a stronger position than they often realise. With the right frameworks in place, they can challenge both internal teams and external vendors to demonstrate how data is actually driving performance.

A simple way to anchor this is through a three-part lens for assessing data effectiveness:

• Useful: Define what specific business problem you’d like to address using data
• Usable: Assess the suitability and availability of data solutions for media
• Used: Measure the impact of data on media effectiveness, i.e. the incremental uplift from investment in data

Best Practice for Data Governance

From a procurement and governance perspective, a few principles consistently hold:

1. Protect data integrity: Ensure the data informing media decisions is accurate, consistent, and governed before layering on additional complexity.
2. Prove feasibility early: Test for scalability, operational readiness, and cost before committing to broader rollout.
3. Demand evidence of incrementality: Vendor claims should be validated against real-world performance, with clear guardrails in place.
4. Link data to commercial models: Where possible, quantify the contribution of data within effectiveness frameworks—and align agency incentives accordingly.

Get In Touch

If you want to learn about how to better navigate the complex data landscape to drive media effectiveness, get in touch with us here: