Exposing the Flaws in TV’s Most Common Measurement Tactics

In the Mad Men days of advertising, Don Draper would stroll into a smoke-filled boardroom, cocktail in hand, and confidently pitch a grandiose TV campaign that was more art than ad. Three networks, mass reach, and no pressure to prove performance. Back then, TV was brand theater; an art form designed to dazzle, sell a lifestyle, and shape a generation. Fast-forward to today, and that same screen is expected to drive measurable, accountable, data-driven results.

TV has officially entered its performance era.

As TV becomes more synonymous with a performance channel, the notion of “measurable outcomes” has become a catch-all buzzword. TV ad tech platforms promise sales, conversions, and “guaranteed results.” But peel back the marketing curtain and you’ll find wildly different definitions, many of them proxies that barely scratch the surface of showing real business impact.

At Tatari, measurable outcomes aren’t attention scores or inferred signals; they’re tangible, attributable actions across linear and streaming TV, metrics like site visits, purchases, app installs, and subscriptions. And we achieve them through a fundamentally different way of buying and measuring TV.

Why Most TV Platforms Miss the Mark on "Outcomes”

For all the industry talk about outcomes, many platforms are actually optimizing soft signals: vanity metrics like search lift, brand‑awareness bumps, or attention scores. For example, they’ll celebrate a spike in branded search after your TV ad airs as if it were an instant conversion. That might look good on a dashboard, but that’s not the same thing as a purchase, a subscription, or even a site visit.

Sure, these metrics can be helpful indicators of brand health, but when you’re deciding where to put your next $50K media budget, they fall short. And yet, they’re often positioned as “proof” of performance. Here’s a closer look at the most common television “measurement” tactics being shilled today and why they don’t hold up.

Guaranteed Outcomes

The pitch: Vendors promise a fixed number of conversions or sales tied to your spend.

The reality: Guarantees are usually priced in, leading to inflated CPMs, overly generous attribution windows, or bundled performance from other channels.

Why it misses the mark: Guarantees mask underperformance and remove the incentive to optimize. This raises red flags for marketers: What inventory is being used? Are you sacrificing premium placements like Hulu or Peacock to achieve a low cost-per-acquisition? Are the outcomes truly from TV? Guarantees don't prove performance; they pre-pay for it.

Verified Visits

The pitch: Using identity graphs and location data, you’ll get household-level view-through that credits a “Verified Visit” whenever someone exposed to your ad visits your site within your chosen window. 

The reality: Without a privacy solution, identity signals shrink and match rates fall, forcing modeling to fill the gaps. Vendor-owned identity graphs, built on black-box maps of people and devices, degrade quickly and are hard to audit. What's more, communal IPs (office Wi-Fi, apartments, dorms, hotels, mobile ISPs) can tie exposures to the wrong person or dozens at once. Layer in long lookbacks, cross-device stitching, and last-touch rules, and “verification” starts to look like guesswork.

Why it misses the mark: It creates an illusion of precision. “Verified” visits are easy to over-count, allow multiple channels to claim the same outcome, and rarely prove incremental revenue. They’re noisy proxies, not evidence of business impact.

Branded Search Lift

The pitch: If branded search activity spikes after your TV campaign, that’s impact.

The reality: Isolating TV's contribution to branded search is nearly impossible because it's influenced by countless other factors like seasonality, public relations, and social media campaigns.

Why it misses the mark: It confuses correlation with causation. More searches don’t always equal more customers.

Attention Metrics

The pitch: If someone “paid attention” to your ad via eye-tracking, viewability, or time-in-view it worked.

The reality: Attention is an interesting signal, but it doesn’t guarantee persuasion, recall, or conversion. Vendors even define it differently, making comparisons meaningless.

Why it misses the mark: Attention is a vanity metric. It looks impressive on a slide but doesn’t prove ROI.

At Tatari, we believe outcomes should be proven, not promised. That’s why our pitch is simple; we give you full transparency into what’s driving performance, how it’s measured, and how to scale it.

How We Define Measurable Outcomes

At Tatari, outcomes mean real consumer actions: site visits, purchases, app installs, and subscriptions. We measure this through closed-loop attribution and Tatari View-Through, a methodology purpose-built for TV that accounts for household dynamics and longer decision windows offering a more accurate and conservative approach than digital-style view-through models.

For marketers who want to go even deeper, we offer incrementality measurement so you can understand not just who converted, but who converted because of the TV ad. 

This clarity on what counts as an outcome is what makes Tatari different and it’s what informs how we buy media in the first place.

Tatari’s Buying Strategy: Planning for Real Results

Most platforms treat outcomes as something to measure after a campaign runs. We believe they should guide your media strategy from the very beginning.

Our Planning Engine uses nearly a decade of data across TV campaigns, creative performance, and predictive models to optimize buys based on actual outcomes not assumptions. That means you’re not boxed into narrow audience segments like “sports moms in Dallas” or “affluent cord-cutters in Manhattan.” You’re buying where results have actually happened.

This often surfaces high-performing inventory in places you’d never expect shows or networks that traditional targeting would overlook. Because we’re not guessing who might convert, we’re optimizing for who does convert.

Privacy Can’t Be an Afterthought

As TV becomes more outcome-driven, privacy laws are tightening. Login gates, consent banners, and opt-outs are blocking visibility into what’s working. Measuring outcomes in this new era requires infrastructure built for privacy from the start.

That’s why we partner with Vault, a privacy-first solution for secure, tokenized data sharing between advertisers and publishers. Vault enables accurate, cross-platform measurement without compromising user privacy or regulatory compliance, so marketers can track the outcomes that matter most without sacrificing privacy.

Measure What Matters

Tatari’s platform is built to deliver one thing: driving real business results—or outcomes, as the industry likes to say at the moment. And because we focus on actual conversions and not vanity metrics, you get the insights needed to make smarter, faster media decisions. Contrast that with competitors who rely on inferred signals or optimize to the wrong KPIs, and the difference becomes clear.

We’ve also built a robust and flexible measurement ecosystem, teaming up with best-in-class measurement providers, to give TV advertisers a clear, accurate view of performance.

We’re clearly no longer in the Mad Men era of TV. Don Draper wouldn’t even recognize the game and we’d bet he’d probably need a stiff double to pour through the BS vendors are shoving down marketing teams’ throats.

Ready to see what real TV outcomes look like? Schedule a demo to learn more.