Justin Pearse, Editor, New Digital Age, sits down with Richard Bettinson, Senior Director of Media Insight, Strategy and Planning at Hilton, to discuss marketing measurement, agency relationships, and the evolving role of technology in media planning.
What are you most excited about this year in the world of media?
The biggest shift is in marketing measurement and effectiveness with the ultimate aim to establish a clearer, more structured approach to measuring marketing investment and campaigns.
This is a crucial cultural shift, moving towards a more data-driven mindset and it’s something I feel passionate about.
The key is creating a consistent end-to-end process, from writing better briefs to setting clear objectives and, ultimately, evaluating the impact of media investment.
You mentioned this shift goes beyond media. What do you mean by that?
Marketing impact extends well beyond the media team. The goal is to shift the conversation from media performance in isolation to the broader impact of marketing on business outcomes.
The focus needs to be on building long-term roadmaps to measure success beyond just impressions and click-through rates. This means demonstrating the tangible value that marketing brings to the business as a whole, whether that’s revenue growth, customer engagement, or brand equity.
Balancing performance and brand marketing is a major challenge. How do you approach this?
The aim should be to break down the traditional divide between brand and performance marketing. It’s all advertising, just with different objectives. Brand activity has short-term impacts, and performance campaigns contribute to long-term brand equity.
Marketing mix modelling helps you optimise spend holistically across both areas. It is however important you have a budgeting structure that allows you flexibility and freedom to focus on driving total business impact rather than short-term vs. long-term trade-offs.
Let’s talk technology. AI is a huge talking point. How is it impacting media strategy?
AI is making a real difference, particularly in media targeting and creative optimisation. As a industry we’re increasingly trusting platforms like Meta and Google to identify the right audience dynamically, rather than manually setting up multiple audience segments.
This has led to more efficient media buys and better performance. AI also plays a role in marketing insights, the ability to segment audiences and analyse sentiment is improving, and feedback loops are becoming faster.
The speed at which we are able to measure campaign effectiveness has increased dramatically.
The industry has been talking about the decline of third-party cookies for years. Is signal loss as big an issue as some make it out to be?
Honestly, it feels overplayed.
Platforms like Google and Meta have known this shift was coming and have been adapting for years. There has not been a major disruption in the ability to target or measure effectiveness. The tools available, such as LiveRamp and Treasure Data, allow you to use first-party data more effectively, mitigating the impact of cookie deprecation.
Creativity is still fundamental. How do you measure its impact?
This is a challenge, separating the impact of creative from media is difficult. We often credit media spend for success, without acknowledging the role of creative effectiveness.
A priority should be to measure how we improve measuring creative performance, ensuring we’re optimising not just where we place ads, but the messages within them. Media platforms provide some insights, but often they’re quite basic “put your logo upfront” isn’t the kind of strategic guidance brands need and there is a need to be pushing for deeper creative analytics to inform your approach.
Out-of-home (OOH) and connected TV (CTV) have been evolving rapidly. What trends are you seeing?
There’s been an interesting shift in creativity within traditional channels like OOH and CTV, driven by data. Increasingly platforms are using digital data to inform offline placements, making them more targeted.
Partnerships with companies like MiQ and Quantcast allow you to integrate audience insights into OOH campaigns. The same applies to video, thinking holistically about video strategy rather than treating linear, CTV, and YouTube separately. Understanding how content appears across different screens is becoming more critical.
Omnichannel was a buzzword a few years ago, but is it now just standard practice?
Absolutely. If you’re not already thinking in an omnichannel way, you’re way behind.
The challenge now isn’t about whether we can deliver seamless messaging across channels, it’s about measuring its effectiveness. The tools exist, but understanding how each touchpoint contributes to overall business goals remains a work in progress.
