Marketing has always run on signals. The question is whether those signals are telling the truth.

According to new research from the Outcomes Marketing Council, a collaborative forum of senior marketing and advertising leaders convened by Affinity Solutions, the answer for most marketers is: not reliably. The Council's inaugural report surveyed 210 senior marketing leaders across brands and agencies and found a gap between what the industry measures and what it actually delivers that is wider and more expensive than most CMOs have been willing to acknowledge.

The speed vs. truth problem

At the heart of the report is a paradox that most marketers recognize but rarely see quantified. The data available in real time is fast but unreliable. The data that's reliable arrives too late to act on. Most marketers are stuck choosing between the two.

The result is an industry running primarily on proxy metrics like attributed digital conversions, modeled outputs, and brand lift studies that were never designed to confirm a sale. More than four in five marketers rely primarily on signals other than verified purchase data when optimizing campaigns in flight. And when those proxy-driven decisions are later reconciled against actual sales outcomes, roughly 35% of marketers find they don't hold up.

That's not a margin of error. It's systematic waste.

The inflation problem no one is talking about

The proxy reliability gap is compounded by a finding that should concern every CMO with a CFO looking over their shoulder: 91% of marketers believe their platform-reported results are overstated to some degree. There has long been the belief that it’s hard to trust a publisher that grades its own homework. Our data suggests that sentiment has become the industry norm.

The financial consequences are measurable. More than two-thirds of marketers estimate that at least 11% of their budget is wasted due to optimization lag alone. More than a third believe the figure exceeds 26%. The ANA has estimated that as much as 23% of total open web programmatic investment, roughly $20 billion, is lost to supply chain inefficiencies. The industry is spending billions optimizing against numbers it doesn't fully trust, on signals that don't reliably predict sales, with data that arrives too late to change course.

The path forward is already visible

The encouraging finding in the report is that a clear early-adopter cohort has already moved beyond this problem. Roughly one in five marketers are already using verified purchase data as their primary in-flight optimization signal. And the results they expect are significant: nearly half of all survey respondents said they would expect double-digit ROAS gains if they could optimize in real time using verified purchase signals.

The barriers to getting there are real but well-defined. Data latency, fragmented data paths, privacy constraints, and internal process limitations all scored nearly equally as obstacles. There is no single bottleneck to fix. But the marketers and technology providers who treat this as a systemic infrastructure problem rather than a series of individual technical fixes are the ones closing the gap fastest.

AI is ready. The data isn't.

Perhaps the most forward-looking finding in the report concerns artificial intelligence. More than three-quarters of campaign optimization now involves some degree of automation. But only 20% is fully automated, and the single biggest factor limiting AI's effectiveness isn't algorithmic. It's data quality, cited far more often than any other barrier.

The implication is significant. AI won't become transformative for marketing until the data feeding it becomes deterministic, timely, and connected to real outcomes. The marketers investing now in verified purchase signals aren't just solving today's optimization problem. They are building the data infrastructure that will determine who wins when AI-driven optimization becomes the industry standard.

The window is open but won’t stay that way

This report is both a diagnosis and a call to action. The marketers who will lead the next era of marketing performance are already moving: optimizing on verified purchase signals, shortening the path between a transaction and a campaign decision, and building AI systems on deterministic data rather than probabilistic proxies.

The tools are maturing. The data is becoming available. The competitive window for early movers is open, but it won't stay that way.

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