The Outcomes Era: Omnicom, Criteo, and CTV in the Industry Google and Meta Built
There’s a nugget in the Oct 15 Omnicom earnings call that says a lot about the remaking of the advertising industry to focus deeply on (measurable) outcomes. Of course, what we might call the Outcomes Era is not entirely new. But that’s exactly why Omnicom CEO John Wren’s remarks struck me. Because when an analyst asked him about his “view of the overall industry” and how it differs from a decade ago, outcomes, or more specifically the ability to measure them, is what Wren focused on:
“Well, I think our product mix has certainly shifted as we've made investments in things like [commerce media platform] Flywheel, things like Omni. We can measure better than we could a decade ago. And anything you can measure, clients typically will sit and give you a very fair hearing about where to invest that money. So, I do think that the industry is in better shape than it was in the last five or six years.”
This focus on measurable outcomes relates to Omnicom’s purchase of Flywheel, which seems to have started out as an Amazon ads agency and evolved into a tech-and-services company that helps CPG brands grow through digital advertising and marketplace optimization. “Today, the Flywheel Commerce Cloud platform manages tens of billions in product sales and billions of advertising spend annually across digital marketplaces,” Omnicom said in the acquisition announcement.
In other words, Omnicom bought Flywheel for $835 million so that it could both better drive retail sales and, critically, measure its ability to do so. That strategy appears to be bearing fruit, both in helping Omnicom sign Amazon’s media business and in shoring up relationships with CPG advertisers. Here’s Wren again: “We're able to measure marketing spend for the very first time, and that's done with a rather important CPG client that we have, where we've proven that it's all measurable. And as we get other clients where we have the opportunity to do that, that's going to further distinguish Omnicom in terms of justifying media spend and ROI and investment in just the general area.”
Flywheel is essentially a commerce media acquisition, and the thesis that “It’s all measurable” — i.e. media spend and outcomes — has driven the growth of one of the two hottest sectors in digital advertising, commerce media, over the past few years. I recently wrote about the successful repositioning of Criteo, historically known for retargeting, as a commerce media platform. It’s no mistake that commerce media shares DNA with performance marketing. They are both mostly about driving lower-funnel outcomes, as CEO Megan Clarken acknowledges in Criteo’s Oct 30 earnings call:
“Today, Criteo operates two growing global segments, Retail Media and Performance Media. … Our solutions have a hyper focus on addressing or advertising to consumers who are on their buyer journey. … We predict outcomes and deliver targeted ads throughout the buyer journey, from discovery to purchase.”
Clarken describes a “transformation” in which Criteo repositioned itself over the past five years, but the comments on the “convergence” of retail and performance media reveal that commerce media isn’t a 180-degree turn so much as an evolution of Criteo’s existing DNA. By leaning into commerce media, Criteo simply made outcomes-based performance advertising cool again. That is, Criteo made itself legible in this new era, showing that it could thrive in the measurable outcomes-obsessed industry that Google and Meta have built.
Clarken implicitly addresses the inspiration Google and Meta have provided for the direction of Criteo, saying, “We came into this sector foreseeing the seismic shift in the digital landscape and the rise of Commerce Media overtaking Linear TV and now taking share from search and social media. The most recent quarterly Skai data showed growth surging to 28% in Retail Media in Q3 while paid search growth slowed to 3% and social growth slowed to 5%.”
This is effective narrative positioning (or, if you like, spin) because it makes Criteo’s success feel of apiece with the overall trajectory of the industry while underscoring their advantages relative to their ultimate competitors (the walled gardens). Essentially, Criteo’s story is that Google and Meta hooked the entire industry on measurable outcomes. Those categories, search and social, are now plateauing. In the meantime, another category, commerce media, has arisen to capitalize on the hunger for outcomes that the walled gardens seeded. Commerce media is still growing fast, and Criteo is the leader of that category.
We can quibble about Criteo’s actual place in the ecosystem, but that’s not my main objective here. My point, rather, is that the Criteo story, especially in relation to the recent Omnicom story post-Flywheel acquisition, speaks to the broader story of digital advertising: the emergence of an Outcomes Era in relation to which every channel and company in our industry is judged. Google and Meta set the terms of the era. Omnicom’s core strategy appears to be competing within it. Commerce media has ballooned thanks to it. And CTV, advertising’s other channel du jour, is wrestling with its identity as a would-be performance channel within the terms of the Outcomes conversation.
I have a few parting observations about the Outcomes Era and future directions within it.
There is a potentially gross misalignment between the ability to measure outcomes and the ability to drive them — and which channels, tactics, and companies are adept at doing each. Tim and Chris Vanderhook, co-founders of Viant, often argue that Google in particular has made its bones by driving “outcomes” via branded search terms that advertising wasn’t required to drive. For example, if I search “Nike” and then click a search ad to go to the Nike store, that doesn’t mean the search ad drove the purchase (Nike’s decades of brand advertising and sponsorships did), but Google will claim credit for the purchase. In an industry where, as Wren put it, “It’s all measurable,” who wins and loses due to the delta between perceived impact and genuine impact? As PebblePost CEO Jacob Ross (ex-Criteo) has argued, incrementality may be the key to avoiding the failures of misattribution.
The future of CTV hinges on its ability to sell itself as existing comfortably within the Outcomes Era. Adtech companies have been touting CTV for years as the hybrid channel that will bring the ‘targeting and measurement capabilities of digital to advertising’s most powerful channel.’ Some of the forward-thinking companies in the space, most notably tvScientific, are premising their pitch on precisely this: the ability to drive performance outcomes of the kind advertisers expect from search and social on CTV — and, critically, to measure those outcomes. Vibe, which just launched a series of AI solutions to democratize access to CTV advertising for SMBs, sees the issue similarly. Performance is essential to shifting (performance) ad dollars from search and social to CTV. And just how big CTV gets depends on its ability to reassure advertisers that it really can drive (measurable) outcomes.
AI will have a massive impact on the Outcomes Era. The success of AI-driven technologies will be buoyed by the Outcomes Era, and AI will also push the Outcomes Era toward new heights. The secret sauce that has made Google and Meta so powerful is their ability to use technology to automate advertising for SMBs, who only care about performance in the form of measurable outcomes. Performance Max and Advantage+ crystallize this approach, increasingly telling advertisers, “Don’t worry about the specifics. Just tell us what outcomes you want, and we’ll make that happen.” Thus, you might imagine that AI will further equip Google and Meta, who can disproportionately invest in emerging technologies, to dominate digital advertising. But AI could also provide the means to replicate Google and Meta’s magic on the open web. This is the great potential of technologies like ViantAI: expanding the TAM of the open web by ushering in SMBs who don’t have an appetite for brand building or the time and talent to create and manage their own ad campaigns.
“It’s all measurable.” But how you measure it, who measures it, and who decides who measures it is a Foucauldian labyrinth dictated by arbitrary bureaucratic dynamics, not the real pursuit of would-be-indisputable outcomes.
