Damian Garbaccio and Doug Campbell on Affinity's Outcomes Marketing Council

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**Ari Paparo** (1:27)
Welcome to Marketecture, where you can get smart fast with in-depth interviews of leading executives. I'm Ari Paparo. I'm here today with two guests. We have Damian Garbaccio, the Chief Commercial and Marketing Officer for Affinity Solutions.
Damian, did I mingle your last name?

**Damian Garbaccio** (1:43)
No, that was perfect.

**Ari Paparo** (1:44)
That was good. Okay, and Doug Campbell, the Chief Strategy Officer for DoubleVerify. I think I got your name right, Doug.
So why do we have two guests? What are we here to talk about? Well, there's a new thing in town. It's called the Affinity Solutions Outcome Marketing Council, a little bit of a mouthful. And it's described to me as a collaborative forum of marketing and advertising leaders focused on advancing accountability and media measurement. And they just came out with a report. So that's what we want to talk about. So Damian, you want to tell us what this is all about?

**Damian Garbaccio** (2:15)
Yeah. Well, happily, and maybe it's just a function of my age, I know a lot of folks in the space have been around for a little bit.
And our work at Affinity is really about outcome and outcome marketing and measurement. So we thought it was a really good idea rather than just sort of talk about our own companies, but get a group of individuals together, some who have been in our space for a long time and some who have been successful and left to really bring a group together to try to help the market, try to help the ecosystem have better marketing outcomes. And what's stopping it, what are the opportunities exist? And so it's a very sort of collaborative effort to help the market.

**Ari Paparo** (2:57)
Right. And so what did you publish? You published a report, Measurement's Tipping Point, the Optimization Blueprint for Brand Growth.
Do you want to go through it or Doug or both?

**Damian Garbaccio** (3:09)
Well, I can just outline it. Doug is one of the significant members of the outcome marketing council. So I certainly, and his input was crucial here, but essentially we did a survey specifically to talk to brands and their agencies. It was like 80% brands and understand their point of view, what's working, what's not around measurement. Everyone's using outcomes and optimization and all these words that hopefully have meaning. But we kind of dug in a little and realized that there was a lot of gaps and there was a lot of ways to improve. And that's our goal, is to help improve. And certainly Doug had a perspective, so I'll hand it off to him.

**Doug Campbell** (3:50)
Yeah, sure. I mean, from my perspective, look, after all these years, it's still pretty difficult to connect ad exposure to actual purchase data. And certainly very difficult to do it in real time for both measurement and for optimization. And so we went out and we wanted to find out what people thought about this exact topic, what they're currently doing and what the best people, the people that are really trying to lead this space are doing. And our goal was just to bring a little bit of data and increase the focus on improving that connection.

**Ari Paparo** (4:27)
And what are the headlines? What did you find out?

**Doug Campbell** (4:30)
So a whole bunch of things. You want me to start?

**Ari Paparo** (4:35)
You can tell I'm not used to doing these two people podcasts. I'm just like, I'm working on it. So, Doug, why don't you start?

**Doug Campbell** (4:42)
Okay. Sure.
Look, at a very high level, the big takeaway was that 91% of marketers believe that their kind of platform-reported results are overstated in some way. And so, probably not that hard to believe that in a world where there's sort of a lack of transparency and some obfuscation about what's going on, along all platforms, that there is still a very large portion of marketers that don't believe exactly the numbers that they get.