Australian advertisers now spend $18.4 billion on digital media every year. That number comes straight from IAB Australia’s 2025 report, and it represents 11.5% growth on the year before. Video alone has crossed $5.4 billion, growing at nearly 20% annually. Search is an $8 billion category. 

These are serious numbers. They reflect genuine commercial ambition. Brands across Australia are investing more in digital media because digital media works. The channels have scale, targeting capability, and the kind of measurability that traditional formats simply cannot match. 

Here’s the thing though: when you look closely at how that spend is actually being evaluated, a troubling pattern emerges. For many businesses, the measurement is not keeping pace with the investment. Not by a long stretch. 

The Measurement Gap Is Bigger Than Most CMOs Will Admit 

WARC’s Future of Measurement 2025 report found that only 2% of marketers globally are using the full combination of attribution, experiments, and marketing mix modelling to evaluate their activity. At the other end of the scale, 22% of marketers use no modelling at all. 

That is a significant gap. In a market where $18.4 billion is being split across search, video, social, and display, not knowing which channels are genuinely driving commercial outcomes is an expensive way to operate. 

Closer to home, IAB Australia’s Market Mix Modelling Landscape Report 2025 tells a similar story. It identified twelve active MMM vendors now operating in Australia, a clear signal that the industry recognises the measurement problem, even if solutions are still being widely adopted. More than 60% of major Australian advertisers are investing in MMM solutions, largely because they have accepted that traditional attribution is not giving them the full picture. 

More than 60% of major Australian advertisers are now investing in MMM solutions. The driver is simple: traditional attribution isn’t showing them what’s actually working. (IAB Australia, MMM Landscape Report 2025) 

Source: IAB Australia, Market Mix Modelling Landscape Report 2025 

Why Platform Attribution Flatters Your Best Channels 

Here is how the distortion typically plays out. A customer sees your brand on YouTube during their morning commute, then gets a retargeting ad on Meta later that day, then searches your brand name on Google and converts. The sale gets attributed to the Google search click because that was the last digital touchpoint before purchase. 

The YouTube campaign did the heavy lifting. The Meta ad reinforced the message. The Google click was simply the final step in a journey that started elsewhere. But your dashboard shows a sale from paid search. 

Multiply this across thousands of customer journeys and you end up with performance data that consistently over-values lower-funnel, last-click channels while systematically under-valuing brand-building, video, and upper-funnel activity. 

Analytic Partners’ ROI Genome research, drawn from more than 1,000 major brands across global markets, quantifies the scale of this distortion directly. It finds that 45% of advertising’s impact on revenue operates through cross-channel halo effects, meaning channels are influencing the performance of other channels in ways that single-source attribution cannot capture. The same research identifies brands relying heavily on last-click data as routinely over-stating some channels’ contribution by between two and ten times. 

Source: Analytic Partners, ROI Genome Intelligence Report 

What This Costs Australian Businesses 

If you are allocating budget based primarily on last-click or platform-provided attribution data, the risk is not that your measurement is slightly off. The risk is that you are making material budget decisions based on a framework that is structurally biased toward certain channels. 

The pattern is predictable: search and retargeting show strong returns on paper. Brand advertising, video, and broader awareness spend show softer numbers, even when they are doing significant commercial work in the background. Over time, budgets drift toward the channels that look good in the dashboard rather than the channels genuinely driving growth. 

ADMA’s Future Ready: 5 Forces Shaping Marketing in 2026 report puts it plainly: ‘Performance marketing has become table stakes. In an AI-democratised world, brand differentiation is the real ROI.’ Australian brands that keep over-indexing on performance channels based on attribution data are optimising away from the very thing that will differentiate them. 

Source: ADMA, Future Ready: 5 Forces Shaping Marketing in 2026 

What Better Measurement Actually Looks Like 

Marketing mix modelling takes a fundamentally different approach. Rather than following individual user paths and assigning credit to the last touchpoint, MMM analyses the statistical relationship between marketing investment and commercial outcomes at an aggregate level. It looks at what actually happened to sales when spend went up or down in a given channel, all other factors considered. 

This approach captures what attribution cannot. It separates the contribution of brand advertising from performance media. It accounts for external factors like seasonality, economic conditions, and promotional activity. It shows you the point of diminishing returns for each channel, so you can see not just which channels work but at what investment level they stop working efficiently. 

Both Telstra and ANZ have deployed mix modelling approaches to understand the true drivers of their commercial performance, with Telstra building over 900 machine learning models for marketing measurement across its business. These are not small, experimental projects. They are enterprise-grade acknowledgements that traditional measurement was not sufficient. 

Source: CMO Australia, Telstra machine learning marketing mix modelling; AMI, ANZ commercial mix modelling 

A Practical Starting Point 

You do not need to scrap your current measurement setup. Platform attribution and campaign dashboards are genuinely useful for day-to-day campaign optimisation. What needs to change is how decisions get made at the strategic level. 

Start with one honest question: if your top-performing channel went dark for six weeks, what would happen to your business? If you genuinely cannot answer that, your measurement is not yet telling you what it needs to. 

Australia’s $18.4 billion digital advertising market deserves to be measured properly. The tools to do it are more accessible than ever, and the cost of not doing it, in misallocated budgets and missed growth, has never been higher. 

Want to understand what your media spend is actually driving? Organise a demo call with us to discuss further.