Most marketers waste 11% of media budgets on bad optimization signals

The majority of senior marketing leaders still cannot connect ad exposure to actual purchases in real time, and the wasted spend is now quantified: more than two-thirds estimate at least 11% of media budgets are lost to optimization lag, according to research published today.

A new report from the Affinity Solutions Outcomes Marketing Council lays out a measurement failure that sits at the heart of modern advertising. Released on May 21, 2026, Measurement's Tipping Point: The Optimization Blueprint for Brand Growth is based on a survey of 210 senior brand and agency marketers conducted in March 2026. The findings are stark - and difficult to dismiss.

According to Affinity Solutions, four in five respondents said they primarily optimize campaigns in-flight using signals other than verified purchase data. When those proxy-driven decisions are later reconciled against actual sales outcomes, roughly 35% find they do not hold up. That figure is not a rounding error. It represents a third of all active campaign decisions made on signals that turn out to be wrong.

The proxy hierarchy is revealing. Attributed digital conversions - leads, sign-ups, and app downloads - are the most common primary in-flight optimization signal, cited by 25% of respondents. Modeled conversions and media mix model outputs came second at 21%, followed by verified purchase data at 19%, which is nearly tied with brand lift and sentiment studies at 17%. Platform metrics such as click-through rates and viewability account for the final 17%.

Affinity Solutions describes the overall picture plainly: the industry is running primarily on signals that were never designed to confirm a sale. When respondents were asked what share of their optimization decisions are based on proxy metrics, 48% said between 26% and 50% of decisions, another 20% said 51% to 75%, and 8% said 76% to 100%.

The financial toll of optimization lag

The report attempts to quantify what this disconnect actually costs. More than two-thirds of marketers estimate at least 11% of their media budgets are wasted due to optimization lag. More than a third believe the waste exceeds 26%. Only 27% believe less than 10% of their budget is lost this way.

"Marketing is still optimizing against signals that are too slow, fragmented, and disconnected from actual sales," said Damian Garbaccio, Chief Commercial and Marketing Officer at Affinity Solutions. "That creates enormous systemic waste. The marketers who close the gap between media spend and verified outcomes will have a major competitive advantage."

The scale of that waste, at current industry spending levels, represents a substantial and largely avoidable annual loss. The report also references a 2023 ANA study finding that as much as 23% of total open web programmatic investment - roughly $20 billion - is wasted due to supply chain inefficiencies. The ANA attributed part of that problem to the same dynamic the Affinity Solutions data surfaces: advertisers prioritize cost over value, sometimes to their own detriment. The IAB similarly identified measurement accountability gaps as spending in commerce media approaches $100 billion.

An additional layer of exposure comes from the data path itself. According to the report, for 58% of respondents the journey from point of sale to campaign optimization platform involves three to five touchpoints. Another 9% operate in highly fragmented environments with six or more hops between transaction and activation. Only 34% have direct or integrated data paths with one or two touchpoints. Each additional hop adds latency, increases the risk of data degradation, and widens the gap between what happened and when a marketer can act on it.

Platform results: 91% believe their numbers are overstated

Perhaps the most consequential finding in the entire report is also the most overlooked. According to Affinity Solutions, 91% of marketers say platform-reported results are overstated to some degree. Only 9% believe their current results are fully accurate. Of the remaining 91%, 52% believe their results are inflated by between 1% and 20%, 28% believe inflation runs between 21% and 50%, and 10% believe it exceeds 50%.

One in ten marketers believes that more than half of what their platforms report as success is not accurate.

Doug Campbell, Chief Strategy Officer at DoubleVerify, describes the situation in direct terms: "Marketers face an impossible choice; act on signals that are fast but unreliable, or wait for accurate data that arrives too late. When two-thirds say their proxy-driven decisions only hold up half the time against actual sales, that's not a measurement gap - that's systematic waste. Closing it requires verified outcomes at the speed of AI decision-making."

DoubleVerify has itself been building measurement infrastructure to close those gaps through AI-powered verification and outcome analysis. The company is one of several Council members contributing to this research, alongside Claritas and Lexitas.

Despite widespread acknowledgment of inflated numbers, many marketers have made a quiet peace with the situation. The report notes that satisfaction with measurement tools and confidence in results are two different things. According to Affinity Solutions, 75% of all respondents say they are at least satisfied with their measurement and optimization tech stack - yet the same pool overwhelmingly suspects those tools are reporting false positives. Agency marketers express notably greater satisfaction than brand counterparts, at 89% versus 72%, an asymmetry that maps to where the budget risk actually sits.

Barriers are systemic, not singular

Among those not yet optimizing on verified purchase data, data latency topped the list of obstacles at roughly 30%, followed closely by internal process limitations at 26%, lack of access to timely transaction data at 26%, budget constraints at 25%, and privacy constraints at 25%. The near-equal distribution across every category is itself a finding: there is no single bottleneck to address. The problem is embedded simultaneously across technology, organizational structure, and process.

Privacy constraints add a further layer. According to the report, only 12% of respondents say privacy has no impact on their ability to optimize effectively. Twenty-four percent say it significantly limits their effectiveness. Even marketers who have invested in shortening their data paths are constrained in how they can activate those signals against audiences.

Marketing measurement confidence has been stalling across the industry, with separate research from TransUnion and EMARKETER documenting that 54% of marketers reported no change in measurement confidence year over year and 14% said it declined. Internal stakeholders question metrics in 60% of organizations. The Affinity Solutions data gives those doubts a financial shape.

The budget exposure compounds as well. When asked what percentage of their media budget operates without in-flight optimization due to data latency, 45% of respondents said between 26% and 50% of their budget runs without any in-flight adjustments. Another 23% said 51% to 75%, and 7% said 76% to 100%. For a significant share of marketers, the majority of their media investment is running unoptimized - not by strategy, but because the data simply does not arrive in time.

The divide between brand and agency marketers

A consistent gap runs through the data between how brand marketers and agency marketers experience these problems. Brand marketers are more likely to maintain a predefined split between brand and performance objectives, at 35%. Agency marketers are more likely to shift budgets dynamically based on in-flight performance signals, at 41%. Agencies also express greater satisfaction with tools, greater optimism about the upside of purchase-based optimization, and more advanced AI adoption for budget decisions.

According to Affinity Solutions, agency respondents reporting AI-driven budget allocation account for 35% compared to the broader average of 17%. Nearly half of agency respondents expect ROAS gains of 16% to 30% from real-time purchase signal optimization, compared to roughly a third of brand marketers.

"Marketers have spent years optimizing the wrong thing. They've built sophisticated stacks to measure what's easy to measure, not what actually matters. The result is a generation of tools that tell you a lot about how your campaign performed and very little about whether it drove a sale. That's not a data problem. It's a prioritization problem, and it starts with what we choose to buy," said Damian Garbaccio, Chief Commercial and Marketing Officer at Affinity Solutions.

AI adoption is wide but shallow

The report devotes its fourth section to artificial intelligence, and the picture that emerges undermines a widespread assumption: AI is not being held back by capability. It is being held back by data quality.

AI adoption across marketing organizations is real and broad. Forecasting is the most common application, used by 37% of respondents, followed by creative optimization at 33% and targeting at 28%. Budget allocation and reporting automation each account for around 19%. Fewer than 19% report limited AI use, meaning the vast majority of marketing organizations have moved beyond experimentation into active deployment.

But the automation picture is more uneven. According to Affinity Solutions, campaign optimization today exists on a wide spectrum: 20% of respondents describe their optimization as fully automated, 25% as mostly automated, and 32% as partially automated. Another 14% are minimally automated and 8% are not automated at all.

Data quality is the single biggest factor limiting AI's effectiveness, cited by 28% of respondents - far ahead of any other barrier. Lack of real purchase-level data follows at 15%, privacy constraints at 13%, and unclear ROI at 11%.

Separate industry research has documented that 82% of programmatic buyers now say AI-powered optimization is important when evaluating partners, a shift from optional to non-negotiable. But that demand sits on the same unreliable data infrastructure the Affinity Solutions report documents.

When marketers were asked how confident they are in the quality of data feeding their AI systems, 31% said very confident. But 29% are neutral, 20% are somewhat confident, and 10% are not confident at all. A substantial share of the industry is running AI systems on data they privately doubt.

The constraint holding back full automation, according to the report, breaks down as follows: identity fragility from the loss of signals and cookies tops the list at 29%, followed by operational silos at 24% and data integrity at 22%. A fourth constraint is notable for being non-technical: 19% of respondents described a trust gap, meaning they are simply not ready to hand optimization decisions to automated systems. That barrier requires demonstrated results and organizational change management alongside infrastructure investment.

The early adopter cohort and the ROAS upside

Against this backdrop, a meaningful minority is already operating differently. According to the report, roughly one in five marketers already uses verified purchase data as a primary optimization signal. Nearly half of all respondents expect double-digit ROAS gains from real-time purchase signal optimization. Asked for a conservative figure, 36% of respondents said they would expect a 5% to 15% ROAS lift, and 33% said 16% to 30%. Another 13% expect more than 30% improvement.

Media.net's October 2025 partnership with Claritas, one of the Outcomes Council member companies, produced ELEVATE - described as the first sell-side attribution and optimization solution for the open web, designed precisely to address the measurement gap by embedding attribution upstream in the supply chain.

Nishat Mehta, CEO at Lexitas and former President of Circana, offered broader context on the transition: "I was surprised to see in these results that a significant number of marketers continue to use proxy metrics instead of actual purchase data to measure the performance of their advertising. Additionally, many that use purchase data focus only on their first-party data rather than an industry-wide metric that teases out share gains vs. rising tides. The technology and access to data have improved drastically over the past few years and a review of how your marketing is being measured is worth doing if you haven't in the past 24 months."

The tools that current laggards depend on are, according to the report's respondents, on a countdown. Media mix modeling is seen as the most vulnerable tool, cited by 37% as likely to be replaced by continuous AI-driven optimization platforms within two to three years. Multi-touch attribution models follow at 33%. Manual campaign reporting workflows are cited by 30%.

Chase Miller, Chief Growth Officer at Claritas, summarizes the direction: "We're at an inflection point. The marketers pulling ahead aren't waiting for better tools. They're operating on better data. When verified purchase data drives optimization and AI has deterministic inputs to work with, performance stops being episodic and starts being continuous. That's the opportunity in front of every marketer today."

Why this matters

The report is relevant across the digital advertising ecosystem. Mixed media model shortcomings in measuring linear TV have already drawn industry attention, and the Affinity Solutions data positions MMM as one of the most vulnerable legacy tools. The finding that 91% of marketers distrust platform-reported results applies directly to every programmatic buyer, performance marketer, and media planner calibrating bids or budgets against numbers they suspect are inflated. IAB's April 2026 report on retail media measurement reached a compatible conclusion: legacy measurement frameworks are understating the true value of commerce media while leaving marketers without the causal evidence to justify or optimize spend.

Timeline

2025 - Affinity Solutions establishes the Outcomes Marketing Council, bringing together leaders from DoubleVerify, Claritas, Lexitas, and other organizations to advance outcomes-based advertising measurement.
October 1, 2025 - Media.net and Claritas launch ELEVATE, the first sell-side attribution and optimization solution for programmatic advertising on the open web.
October 24, 2025 - Research from TransUnion and EMARKETER reveals marketing measurement confidence has plateaued: 54% of marketers report no change in confidence year over year, and 60% of organizations say internal stakeholders question their metrics.
November 6, 2025 - IAB releases a measurement framework for commerce media campaigns, establishing causal validity standards as commerce media spending approaches $100 billion.
January 20, 2026 - Research documents that 82% of programmatic buyers now require AI-powered optimization when evaluating partners, with audience targeting, bid automation, and measurement-and-attribution among the top expected AI applications.
February 1, 2026 - French marketing trade group urges hybrid measurement as cookie-free tracking fails to deliver on incremental accuracy, recommending experimental and verified lift methodologies.
March 2026 - Affinity Solutions Outcomes Marketing Council conducts its survey of 210 senior brand and agency leaders across retail, entertainment, automotive, technology, finance, travel, telecom, pharma, and other categories. The survey is designed and fielded independently by PureSpectrum.
April 9, 2026 - IAB publishes a paper arguing legacy measurement is understating retail media's real value, noting that commerce media spending is forecast to grow 12.1% in 2026.
May 21, 2026 - Affinity Solutions Outcomes Marketing Council publishes Measurement's Tipping Point: The Optimization Blueprint for Brand Growth, based on the March 2026 survey.

Summary

Who: The Affinity Solutions Outcomes Marketing Council, a collaborative forum established in 2025 whose members include Damian Garbaccio of Affinity Solutions, Doug Campbell of DoubleVerify, Chase Miller of Claritas, Nishat Mehta of Lexitas, and Kelley O'Hara of BreakAway Data. The survey covers 210 senior brand and agency marketers across multiple verticals.

What: A research report, Measurement's Tipping Point: The Optimization Blueprint for Brand Growth, that quantifies the financial cost of disconnected campaign measurement and optimization. Key findings include: 80% of marketers optimize without verified purchase data, 35% find those decisions do not hold up against actual sales, 91% believe platform-reported results are overstated, more than two-thirds estimate at least 11% of media budgets are wasted due to optimization lag, and only 20% of campaign optimization is fully automated despite widespread AI investment.

When: The underlying survey was conducted in March 2026. The report was published on May 21, 2026.

Where: The research covers senior marketing leaders across brands and agencies primarily in the United States. The council is headquartered in New York.

Why: The report addresses a structural problem in how advertising performance is measured and acted upon: the infrastructure moving data from point of sale to campaign optimization platform has too many steps, arrives too slowly, and degrades along the way, forcing marketers to rely on proxy signals that a significant fraction later prove unreliable when reconciled against real sales data.