At last November’s Innovation Day, Lía Inoa Pimentel (Senior Global Manager of Brand Experience and Media Measurement at Mars) and Liz Salway (Senior Director of Digital Marketing at Empathy Lab by EPAM) joined us for a fireside chat that brought a fresh perspective to marketing measurement. Their conversation focused on a challenge many CMOs face, but few have solved: how to understand the sales impact from media investment while campaigns are in-flight.
The session didn’t revolve around theory or future trends. It was grounded in a real pilot campaign, real data and a real shift in how Mars approaches marketing effectiveness.
A new approach to an old problem
During the chat, Liz and Lía explained how many CPG companies are seeking a more deterministic relationship between media deployment and actual sales outcomes in store. Traditional brand lift studies and post-campaign sales analysis are too slow to support agile decision-making. The Mars team wanted to understand which audience strategies were driving incremental sales – not months later, but during the campaign lifecycle itself. Specifically, they needed insight after a purchase cycle, yet before the campaign concluded, enabling real-time optimization towards measurable business impact.
“At Mars, data is at the heart of every decision we make, which is why measurement is so important to us. We believe that the best predictor of behavior is behavior itself. Not what people say they're going to do, but what they actually end up doing.”
Lía Inoa Pimentel, Senior Global Manager at Mars
To uncover which audience strategies were generating real commercial results, they designed a geo-targeted experiment using YouTube ads for a national retailer. Four audience cohorts were tested, and the results were tracked in real time. The campaign was powered by a cloud-based infrastructure that brought media data, sales data, and data science into a single environment.
Liz described how tools like BigQuery, Vertex AI, and Looker enabled the team to bring disparate data together to build a closer link between media and sales, underpinned by data science. This gave Mars the option to shift spend, based on sales uplift measurement by audience cohort, while the campaign was still live.
What this changes for CMOs
The implications of this approach go beyond supporting large, big budget brands. It enables Mars to support smaller brand executions and also test strategies for new product development. It supports experimentation, enables faster learning, and reduces the operational burden on agencies and internal teams. For CMOs, this opens up new possibilities.
Sales measurement becomes part of the campaign itself, not a post-mortem – which is a gamechanger for CPGs. Teams can act on insights as they emerge, rather than waiting for final reports. And the interplay between shopper marketing and media (often difficult to quantify) becomes visible and actionable.
Building for the future
Throughout the conversation, both experts emphasized the importance of building AI-ready teams (more on this in Alex van Gestel’s article on AI impact). The shift to real-time measurement isn’t just about technology. It requires new skills, new workflows and a mindset that embraces continuous learning.
Liz added that empathy remains central to this transformation. Understanding audiences, responding to their behavior, and designing campaigns that resonate is core to the media planner’s work. This tool enables Mars agency partners to hone their strategies to drive the highest possible business impact from media investment. Man and machine in perfect harmony.
Bold question: What happens when we let empathy guide measurement, not the other way around?
Ask your team this: If we can measure everything in real time, are we still listening in real time?
What happens when we know the numbers instantly but miss the meaning entirely?
A quiet revolution in marketing measurement
The fireside chat closed with a reflection on what this shift means for the role of the CMO. Measurement is no longer a reporting function. It’s a strategic capability. And those who embrace it can move faster, learn more and deliver greater value to their organizations.
Mars didn’t just improve how they measured campaigns. They redefined what it means to listen to data, to audiences, and to the moment.
The conversation with Liz and Lía stood out at Innovation Day 2025 for its clarity, its practicality, and its quiet confidence in what marketing can become when measurement is reimagined. It reminded us that transformation doesn’t always come with fanfare. Sometimes, it starts with a better question… and a willingness to answer it differently.
Your next move in smart marketing measurement
The days of waiting weeks for brand lift studies or post-campaign sales analysis are over. Here’s how we can help you move to real-time intelligence.
1. Shift from retrospective to real-time measurement: Replace slow, post-campaign studies with continuous, in-flight insight that guides decisions as they happen.
2. Connect your data signals across channels: Bring together media, commerce and behavioral data so performance becomes instantly visible.
3. Instrument your campaigns for agility: Build measurement frameworks that allow rapid optimization, not static reporting cycles.
4. Adopt tools that translate signals into action: Use AI and automated analytics to surface the insights that matter in a way that’s fast enough to actually change outcomes.
If you’re looking to revolutionize your measurement capability and build true agility into your marketing, we’re here to help. Please get in touch with one of our experts.
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