Julian Berry, Founder of Unifida, gave a fascinating talk to Silver Marketing Association members in January 2026. Here he summarises his insights – an essential read for all marketers wanting to understand how to attribute and measure their marketing spend.
The background
- There is widespread distrust in the reporting of marketing performance
- A recent eMarketer report found that 60% of internal stakeholders question the validity of their metrics
- Lack of trust leads to uncertainty around overall budget allocation
- Poor metrics lead to wasteful decisions
Why does it matter?
- We spend £46bn per annum on marketing media in the UK
- 2,500 organisations are each spending > £1m
- We have 19,000 businesses listed as advertising agencies
- And no less than 8,000 digital marketing agencies
- All needing marketing metrics they can rely on
It used to be so straightforward!
- In 1986 I was Head of Direct Marketing for TSB Bank
- We had 7m customers and a single direct channel, direct mail
- We sent out around 10m targeted mailshots pa
- Branches did the fulfilment
- Measurement was via an unmailed control group
- We made £70m profit pa
But it’s now increasingly complex!
- We have 10+ significant marketing channels
- These cover online and offline, direct and indirect
- Stakeholders want reporting that they can trust covering all of these
- Take an example, Majestic Wines a client of UniFida
- They use TV, Radio, Meta, Google, Direct Mail and email
- In a retail environment with 200 stores, they want to know the incremental ROI of each channel and campaign at each time of year
Reporting has become cacophonous
- CMOs are drowning in numbers
- Meta, Google, and TikTok all have their own reporting dashboards
- Agencies report on their own media purchases
- TV measurement alone can involve call tracking, website spikes, sales lift and brand metrics
- While CMOs just need a single view of the truth
So how can trust in measurement be restored?
- Marketeers require objectivity, and incrementality
- The sum of sales across all reports should equal the actual sales
- Measurement should not be provided by media owners like Meta and Google marking their own homework
- Measurement requires technology and people, and that costs money
- The good news is that it should not exceed 2.5% of media spend, and can be as low as 0.25%
What is best practice in marketing measurement?
- There are two core techniques, econometrics (MMM), and multi-touch attribution (MTA)
- MMM provides the big picture
- Excellent at identifying incrementality
- And for measuring the effect of indirect channels like TV or Press
- But not so good for granularity
- Or splits by customer segments
- And does require very skilled data scientists (unless you trust AI to deliver it!)
- MTA provides the granularity needed for all direct channels
- It looks at online and offline customer journeys in a 90-day period before a purchase
- It weights the contribution of each step in each journey
- And reports on performance by multiple criteria such as channel, campaign, customer segment, and geography
- But it’s not incremental
Combine MMM and MTA to get closest to the truth
- This provides incrementality combined with granularity
- In effect the MMM provides a scaling factor to the raw outputs from the MTA
- The negatives are the resource required to set it up
- And the multiple data feeds required for MTA including full browsing history, full outbound contact history, all transactions and all marketing costs
But you get the results you need.
In conclusion
- If you are spending serious money on media, then it’s time to invest in marketing measurement
- This will provide:
- Clarity around overall marketing budget allocation (how much should be allocated)
- Visibility into how best to allocate budget for each channel and time of year
- Improved ROI from individual marketing channels
- Ability to remove waste
- Time saving through avoiding multiple conflicting reports
- Trust in measurement
A talk given at the Silver Marketing Association’s Networking Drinks – 28 January 2026
by Julian Berry, Founder of UniFida
