Latest / The CMO Podcast with Fexingo: Marketing Leadership, Budgets, and Executive Strategy / Why CMOs Are Ditching Brand Trackers for Predictive Metrics
Transcript
- Lucas: If you're a CMO at a Fortune 500 company, you have probably run a brand tracking study at some point. You know the drill — thousands of survey responses, questions about aided awareness, unaided awareness, purchase intent. And for decades, that was the gold standard for measuring brand health. Luna: Right — the quarterly brand tracker. It's almost a rite of passage for brand managers. But I've noticed more and more CMOs quietly walking away from it. Lucas: Publicly walking away, in some cases. Procter & Gamble's CMO, for example, said in early 2025 that they were dramatically cutting back on traditional brand awareness surveys. Their argument was simple: recall-based metrics don't correlate strongly enough with actual sales to justify the cost. Luna: And P&G spends something like eight hundred million a year on marketing measurement alone. So when they say a tool isn't working, people listen. Lucas: Exactly. What's replacing it is a shift toward predictive metrics — not asking consumers if they remember an ad, but looking at what they actually do after seeing it. Search volume, direct site traffic, social listening share of voice. Signals that are closer to real-time and closer to revenue. Luna: Makes sense. But isn't there a risk of overcorrecting? Awareness still matters — if nobody knows your brand, nobody's going to search for it. Lucas: Fair point, and nobody's saying brand building is dead. What's being questioned is the reliability of recall as a proxy for business outcomes. There was a study in 2024 by an analytics firm called Reckless — they looked at fifty major CPG campaigns and found that seventy percent of the brand lift captured by in-survey recall disappeared within seventy-two hours. Luna: Seventy percent in three days? That's not brand building, that's a short-term memory test. Lucas: Right. And that's the problem — CMOs are being asked to justify budgets based on metrics that don't predict sustained behavior. So they're looking for signals that do. One example: Spotify has moved away from traditional awareness studies for its own brand marketing. Instead, they use streaming data — things like playlist additions, time spent listening, and share of streaming time among competitors. Luna: Which is essentially behavioral data at scale. You can see if someone who saw your ad actually added your brand's playlist. That's a lot more concrete than 'yes, I recall seeing an ad for Spotify.' Lucas: Exactly. And Spotify uses that to sell their own ad platform too — they tell advertisers, 'Look, we use these same metrics to measure our own brand health.' It's a powerful proof point. Luna: So who else is making this shift? I know Microsoft's CMO has talked about moving to an 'always-on' brand dashboard. Lucas: That's a great example. Microsoft replaced its quarterly brand tracker with a real-time dashboard pulling from search trends, social conversation volume, sentiment analysis, and even earnings call transcripts to see how analysts talk about the brand. They claim it gives them a more actionable picture of brand health week to week, not quarter to quarter. Luna: And PepsiCo has done something similar — they use predictive models that combine retailer point of sale data with social listening. They can forecast sales lift from a campaign before the campaign even ends. Lucas: That's the direction. Instead of waiting six weeks for a survey report, you're seeing in near-real time whether the messaging is breaking through. But the shift isn't just about speed — it's about tying brand metrics to revenue outcomes. Luna: That's the holy grail, right? Connecting brand investment directly to a P&L line. Lucas: It is. And a growing number of CMOs are now requiring that any brand metric used in a board presentation must show a statistically significant correlation with either revenue or customer lifetime value. If it doesn't, it's off the dashboard. Luna: That's a pretty high bar. I wonder how many traditional brand trackers would survive that test. Lucas: Probably not many. And that's partly why the big research firms — Nielsen, Kantar, Ipsos — are all racing to build predictive models of their own. They know the old model is under threat. Luna: It's interesting because this conversation — about measuring what actually matters — it's something we try to do here on the show too. No fluff, just what works. Lucas: Absolutely. And we can keep this show ad-free and independent because a handful of listeners chip in monthly over at buy me a coffee dot com slash fexingo. That's what funds the research, the production, everything. It's a small group, but it makes a huge difference. Luna: Yeah, and we really appreciate it. It keeps us focused on the ideas that matter, not on pleasing advertisers. Lucas: So back to the metrics — one company that's taking this to an extreme is the direct to consumer mattress brand, let's call them Brand X. They stopped doing any brand tracking surveys entirely. Instead, they use a single metric: cost per incremental search session. Luna: Cost per incremental search session — meaning, how much did this ad spend drive people to actively search for your brand on Google? Lucas: Exactly. They found that correlated extremely well with new customer acquisition. And it's a metric you can optimize in real time. If a TV ad airs and search spikes go up, you know it worked. If they don't, you cut the creative. Luna: That's a far cry from 'our aided awareness went up three points this quarter.' Lucas: Worlds apart. But there's a catch — these predictive metrics work best for established brands with enough search volume to be statistically significant. For a brand-new company, awareness is still the starting point. You can't search for something you've never heard of. Luna: So the playbook might differ by brand stage. Early stage: build awareness any way you can. Later stage: replace awareness metrics with behavior metrics. Lucas: That's a fair framework. And it explains why some CMOs are keeping a stripped-down brand tracker but supplementing it with predictive dashboards. The key is not to rely on recall alone. Luna: What about the agency side? Are they pushing back? Because agencies often get paid based on awareness metrics they deliver. Lucas: Some are embracing it — the smarter ones see it as a way to demonstrate real value. But there's definitely tension. If a client shifts to a predictive metric like share of search, and the agency's creative doesn't move that needle, it's a lot harder to hide behind a survey that says 'awareness is up.' Luna: So it raises the bar for creative effectiveness too. You can't just make a memorable ad — it has to drive action. Lucas: Exactly. And I think that's ultimately a good thing. It pushes marketing closer to being a measurable growth function rather than a cost center. That's the direction the best CMOs are moving. Luna: I'm curious — do you see any industry where traditional brand tracking still makes sense? Lucas: Maybe luxury goods, where the purchase cycle is long and brand perception is critical. Even there, though, you're seeing brands like LVMH experiment with social sentiment and earned media value. The trend is clear. Luna: So five years from now, do you think any CMO will still run a standard quarterly brand tracker? Lucas: Maybe as a diagnostic supplement — a pulse check, not the main event. The main event will be a real-time, revenue-connected dashboard that tells you what's working today, not what people remembered from last quarter.