Accelerating Growth with Smarter Measurement: A New Path Out of the Doom Loop

This article was originally published in Martech.org.

Is the marketing industry in the middle of a reckoning?

The recently published WARC “Multiplier Effect” study sheds light on an all-too-familiar challenge. Our over-reliance on short-term performance marketing has led us into what WARC calls the “Doom Loop,” a cycle in which brands keep investing in what’s immediately measurable, while starving brand-building marketing activity. The result? Shrinking brand equity, diminishing returns, and unsustainable growth.

Marketers are caught in a trap: optimizing for clicks, conversions, and return on ad spend (ROAS) in the near term, while undermining their long-term brand health. But here’s the twist: this isn’t just a media mix problem. It’s a measurement problem.

To escape the Doom Loop, we don’t need to swing the mix wildly back to brand—or abandon performance tactics altogether. We need to fix how we measure. After all, measurement isn’t just about proving value after the fact. It’s how we go to market with better strategies to begin with.

It’s no surprise that performance marketing quickly became the CMO’s favorite child. With its promise of trackable results and immediate impact, performance media thrived in the era of digital transformation. For more than a decade, brands have doubled down on lower-funnel tactics to drive efficiency and meet aggressive growth targets. During this era of performance, eMarketer reports that Meta, Google, and Amazon account for the vast majority of U.S. digital ad spending. In addition to their massive reach, these dominant players have been supported by advances in algorithm-driven media. 

But the pendulum is swinging. Many marketers are realizing that short-term gains have come at the expense of long-term brand building. As we noted in our June MarTech post, advertisers are rediscovering the power of upper-funnel investment and learning how to build a business case for brand media using modern measurement methods.

Still, rebalancing the funnel isn’t easy. Performance budgets have grown so dominant that any shift upward raises eyebrows in the C-suite. Marketers are asked to justify brand spend with the same speed and precision as last-click attribution. That’s where smarter measurement becomes the bridge between brand and performance—and the key to moving forward.

The Doom Loop isn’t just fueled by media mix decisions—it’s driven by how we define success.

When brand and performance teams operate in silos, with separate KPIs, goals, and even creative approaches, they often end up competing for resources. Disparate, disconnected measurement reinforces that divide. We’ve created false trade-offs, where brand investment is seen as a “nice-to-have” because it doesn’t show up in the same dashboards as conversion campaigns. When we do this, we sacrifice long-term value for perceived short-term efficiency.

Measurement is the connective tissue that unites a full-funnel strategy. It doesn’t just prove value—it creates it, by shaping how we plan, test, and optimize across the entire customer journey.

Let’s also be honest: as marketers, many of us have also looped in our CFOs along the way. Finance teams have also become addicted to faulty attribution. Last-click logic and platform-reported ROAS are comfortable but misleading. These metrics reward what’s easy to measure, not necessarily what drives real growth. To break the cycle, we need to change the conversation.

Full-funnel marketing investment should still be held accountable for business outcomes, as all marketing must drive performance. That means eliminating internal silos, investing in more holistic measurement, and making data actionable in real time.

Eliminate Siloes Between Brand & Performance

True integration starts with people and process. That means aligning creative, media, and analytics teams around shared KPIs—not just clicks and conversions—but also incremental growth across the funnel, new customer acquisition, brand love, and loyalty.

Instead of separating brand and performance into different teams or budgets, leading marketing teams are structuring around the customer journey. Cross-functional pods, centralized goals, and unified reporting frameworks create a more agile, growth-focused culture.

Invest in Holistic Measurement

Breaking the “Doom Loop” requires more than just combining dashboards. It takes a diversified, thoughtful approach to measurement.

Media Mix Modeling (MMM) is essential for capturing the impact of brand media. Modern MMMs can ingest granular first-party data, connect to outcomes like new customer acquisition, and quantify the “base-building” effects of brand over time.

Incrementality Testing, such as geo-matched markets or audience holdouts, offers powerful proof of impact. These methods can isolate brand campaign effects on traffic, conversions, and downstream performance efficiency. 

Brand Lift Studies remain a core tool for capturing shifts in awareness, consideration, and intent. When layered with behavioral signals like share of search, site traffic, and social engagement, these insights create a 360-degree view of brand performance.

Make Data Actionable…and Speed it Up

One of the biggest mistakes marketers make is treating analytics and measurement purely as a hindsight function, generating after-the-fact report cards on campaign or seasonal marketing performance. Instead, treat it as a driver of strategy. Prior learnings and insights fuel strategic iteration on the next campaign, product launch, or promotion. 

Real-time data analysis, now super-charged by AI-enabled data platforms, allows marketers to see how upper-funnel campaigns are influencing mid- and lower-funnel behavior. For example, a brand video might not just boost awareness, but also improve branded search efficiency, email open rates, or store traffic.

When measurement is embedded in strategy and campaign design, it becomes a tool for agility and optimization. We can learn, adjust, and scale what’s working—without waiting for quarterly reports.

What happens when brands get this right?

At PMG, we’ve seen brands increase upper-funnel investment while still growing revenue. In one case, a retailer launched an upper-funnel campaign targeted at net-new audiences and used MMM and holdout testing to isolate incremental traffic and conversions. The results not only justified the brand spend, but they revealed that new customer acquisition costs were actually lower than many performance channels.

In another example, a global brand used brand lift and share of search to validate awareness gains from a CTV campaign. Weeks later, they saw improved performance in retargeting and paid search, proving the halo effect of brand investment.

And perhaps most powerfully, we’ve helped marketers walk into budget meetings with CFOs armed with real measurement, moving the conversation from “what’s the ROAS?” to “what’s the incremental value, and how does it drive customer lifetime value?”