Forget opinion polls and viewer surveys — EDO CEO Kevin Krim revealed how behavioral outcomes are transforming TV measurement at IAB's 2025 Annual Leadership Meeting.
The session, titled "Outcomes: Promised Land or Panacea," brought together industry leaders to explore how advertisers can most effectively measure campaign success in a fragmented media landscape. Our CEO was joined by Amazon’s Alan Moss, TelevisaUnivision’s Donna Speciale, Roku’s Jay Askinasi, and moderator Michael Kassan of 3C Ventures.
The panel examined the evolution from traditional reach metrics to more sophisticated outcome-based approaches that connect viewer behavior to business results.
Watch the full panel and read a summary of key insights below.
When asked to define outcomes, Krim emphasized the importance of measuring actual consumer behaviors rather than stated intentions. "People are bad at telling you what they're going to do in the future. They lie to themselves, they lie to the survey taker," he explained.
Behavioral outcomes, such as predictive signals like search and site activity that EDO measures with its syndicated engagement metrics "are the precursors to eventual sales, and they’re immediate and plentiful as data points.” This provides marketers with faster insights than waiting for final conversion data.
The panel discussed the historical reliance on reach as the primary success metric for TV campaigns. Krim highlighted how EDO has innovated by integrating directly with Nielsen's planning tools, allowing advertisers to plan simultaneously for both reach and engagement — what we call Engaged Reach.
"It's crazy that we were ever in a place where we would plan on reach alone and then measure ourselves on actual results," Krim noted. "A lot of the fault was just that we didn't have the data available." Now that these measurement capabilities exist, implementing them has become an imperative for media leaders.
As Amazon VP of global advertising sales Alan Moss noted, there have never been so many capabilities available to advertisers who want to understand how their ads are performing.
“For advertisers ... you should be creating campaigns that really think across the whole awareness, consideration, and conversion continuum,” Moss said. “You should be working with partners that have the tech that can orchestrate across that [continuum], and then ultimately can measure it with you and help you optimize for it.”
To address the challenges of measuring fragmented viewership, Krim revealed that EDO now "deals in petabytes of data" and "hundreds of millions of airings measured" to provide a complete view across platforms. Building these comprehensive TV ad datasets has involved years of technical development and industry partnerships.
Now, the team is using Vertical AI to simplify this overwhelming complexity. "We're talking trillions of impressions across Univision, Amazon, Roku, and everyone else in this ecosystem," Krim explained, highlighting how Vertical AI helps manage "very noisy and very messy data sets" by putting them into enough structure to be actionable.
While discussing creative impact on campaign outcomes, Krim emphasized the importance of data-driven creative assessment over subjective opinions. "Watch what people do, not what they say they're going to do," he advised, noting that EDO now covers "32,000 brands automatically and 115,000 products underneath those brands" to understand what creative approaches truly drive engagement.
In one compelling example, Krim shared how brands using both dynamic creative optimization and interactive video ads (like those featured in Amazon's Black Friday broadcasts) saw powerful engagement compared to those same brands' regular TV ads.
The IAB panel underscored a fundamental shift in how brands and media owners are measuring TV advertising success. Future-proof strategies must now balance traditional reach metrics with behavioral outcomes, leverage massive data sets through AI, and evaluate creative effectiveness through consumer actions rather than opinions.
To learn more about implementing outcomes-based measurement for your TV advertising campaigns, contact our team today.