Before You Trust “Above Benchmark,” Ask These 3 Questions
Every platform has a number that says your campaign worked. Knowing which ones to trust is harder. We asked Jon Finnie, VP of international sales at Yahoo Canada, what proof Canadian marketers should ask for, and what a smaller team can test this quarter without a measurement specialist. It picks up where our look at Skip’s TV duplication test left off.
Answers have been edited for length.
MNC: When a Canadian brand says a campaign worked, what evidence should they be asking a publisher or platform for, beyond impressions and clicks?
JF: There isn’t one universal measure of whether a campaign worked. For one advertiser it might be incremental sales, for another it could be new customers, store visits or qualified leads. What matters is being clear about the outcome you are trying to drive, and then looking at whether your media is actually working towards it.
Part of that is understanding how efficiently you are reaching people. With something like Unified TV reporting, for example, advertisers can get a clearer view of reach and frequency across their TV investment, helping them understand whether they are reaching new audiences or simply reaching the same people more often. That gives them a much more intentional way to manage where their budget is going.
The other piece is connecting media more directly to business outcomes. With Yahoo In-Flight Outcomes, which we recently launched in Canada, advertisers can use real-world outcome signals while a campaign is still running, rather than waiting until the end to understand what worked.
Ultimately, the proof should go beyond whether an ad was delivered or clicked. It should tell you who you reached, how efficiently you reached them and what that investment actually delivered.
MNC: Attention gets talked about a lot. How does Yahoo measure whether content actually held someone’s attention, and where do those measures fall short?
JF: Attention is an important evolution in measurement because it gets us closer to understanding the quality of an exposure, rather than simply whether an ad was technically viewable. But I do not think attention should become another catch-all metric for whether advertising worked.
At Yahoo DSP, attention is one of the signals advertisers can use to inform media buying. Through our partners including Adelaide, for example, advertisers can use pre-bid attention segments to identify and activate against higher-attention opportunities.
What makes attention particularly interesting is that it is not uniform. People engage differently depending on the format, context and even how often they have seen a message. So comparing attention without understanding that context can be misleading.
Ultimately, attention is one piece of the picture. It can tell us something valuable about the quality of the opportunity to engage, but it does not tell us on its own whether someone bought a product, visited a store or became a new customer. The real opportunity is connecting attention with those downstream outcomes, rather than treating it as the outcome itself.
MNC: When a platform reports results above benchmark, what should a marketer ask about how that benchmark was built?
JF: I would ask three simple questions: Compared with what? Built from what? And over what period?
“Above benchmark” sounds compelling, but it only means something if you understand what sits underneath the comparison. Is it based on the same market, category, channel and campaign objective? How recent is the data? And is the sample robust enough to make the comparison meaningful?
This reflects a broader shift we are seeing across the industry. Marketers are becoming much more sophisticated about asking what sits behind the numbers, whether that is a benchmark, an audience, an identity solution or AI-driven optimization. Transparency around methodology matters just as much as the headline result.
The goal should not be to find the most flattering benchmark. It should be to find the most relevant one, and understand enough about how it was built to know what the comparison can genuinely tell you.
MNC: How do you think about reaching new audiences versus reaching the same people more often, and how can a brand tell which one its budget is doing?
JF: It is easy to frame this as reach versus frequency, but neither is inherently better. Repetition can build familiarity and consideration, while reaching new people is critical when the goal is growth. The real question is whether each additional impression is adding value.
That has become harder to understand as people move across CTV, mobile, desktop and the open web. If those environments are looked at separately, the same person can appear to be several different audiences. This is where identity becomes increasingly important, helping advertisers understand unique reach and manage frequency across channels rather than looking at each one in isolation.
There is also a role for better audience strategy. First-party data can help brands understand who they already know, while predictive modelling can help identify new, relevant consumers who share similar signals or behaviours. At Yahoo DSP, that combination of identity, first-party signals and predictive audiences is how we think about extending reach without losing relevance.
Ultimately, brands should be looking beyond total reach and asking: how much of that reach was genuinely incremental, and what did those additional exposures contribute?
MNC: For a smaller Canadian team without a dedicated measurement person, what’s one test they could run this quarter to check whether their media is doing what they think?
JF: I would keep it simple: pick one assumption you are making about your media and test it against one outcome that actually matters to the business.
For example, if you believe a particular audience is bringing in new customers, test it against your existing approach and look at the downstream outcome, not just whether it generated more clicks. Or if you are investing in a new channel, decide upfront what it needs to demonstrate to earn more of your budget.
There is a tendency to equate sophisticated measurement with more metrics, more tools and more dashboards. Often, the opposite is true. A clearly defined objective and a clean test can tell you far more than tracking twenty KPIs without knowing which one really matters.
Technology and automation are also making this more accessible for smaller teams. The real opportunity is not simply having more data, but reducing the work it takes to turn that data into a decision. But the starting point is still very human: be clear about the question you are trying to answer and what success actually looks like.
MNC: Where does measurement still fall short in Canada specifically, and what would you like to see change?
JF: More broadly, one challenge we see across markets is that the issue is no longer a lack of measurement. Marketers have more signals and ways to measure performance than ever before. The harder part is connecting those different views into something coherent and useful.
There is unlikely to be one measurement solution that answers every question. What I would like to see is greater interoperability between platforms, partners and advertiser data, alongside more transparency about what each approach can and cannot tell you.
Ultimately, measurement needs to become easier to act on, not simply more sophisticated. The opportunity is to connect those signals back into media decisions quickly enough that they can improve performance, rather than only explain what happened after the fact.
About Jon Finnie:
Jon Finnie is the Vice President of International Sales at Yahoo, where he leads the company's Canadian operations across Yahoo's consumer properties including Yahoo News, Sports, Finance and its advanced, programmatic advertising platform Yahoo DSP. Jon leads a dedicated team focused on connecting Canadians with the things they love, while working with global agencies and Canada’s top brands to help them achieve their goals.
Throughout his nearly 20-year career at Yahoo, Jon has witnessed firsthand the evolution of the advertising landscape, adapting to and shaping the industry's transformation. He has held progressively senior roles at Yahoo, responsible for advertising revenue, product strategy, and digital initiatives across mobile, video, programmatic and content marketing. Jon now works closely with leading companies to promote Yahoo’s omnichannel platform, providing comprehensive tools and solutions for the entire programmatic process, from planning and insights to buying, optimization and performance measurement.
Prior to Yahoo, Jon held senior positions at Diageo, Barclaycard, Virgin Media and Corus Entertainment, where he developed a broad skill set in business development, digital advertising sales and strategy implementation, making him exceptionally qualified to serve as a judge for Campaign’s inaugural Agency of the Year Awards.
