MeasureUp 2026 Event Wrap

MeasureUp, IAB's largest marketing measurement conference turned three in New Zealand this year, and was bigger and better than ever featuring keynote speakers from Google, Meta and knOOH, high and low data quick takes and an interactive Council-led workshop. Thank you to the IAB New Zealand Data, Privacy & Measurement Council for creating this flagship industry event. If you couldn't be there on the day, here are some of the top outtakes from 2026.

In New Zealand, three years in, the industry has stopped talking about why measurement matters, and is focussing on measurement that works - and how it can be made to work harder. IAB US's State of Data 2026 report found 75% of buy-side marketers felt their leading measurement approaches - incrementality, attribution, MMM - were falling short, so we gathered 17 international and local industry experts to share their perspectives.

Measurement must evolve with technology. Stop counting clicks and start proving growth.

Eby Jose, Meta's Marketing Science Partner, told the room to stop counting clicks. He opened with the number that should concern every CFO: proving ROI is marketers' #1 challenge, and when profits fall, marketing gets cut roughly 45% of the time. Clicks aren't helping - 60% of searches now end without one, Gen Z is twice as likely to make a purchase without clicking than other generations, and there is a 15-25% decline in organic web traffic as a result of AI Search.

Eby's recommendation was stop treating attribution as truth because it shows correlation, not causation. Build a "suite of truth" instead - attribution for speed, MMM for scope, experiments to calibrate both. Incrementality measurement tells you what made the purchase happen and you can think of incrementality as a ladder of options that get closer to measuring true business value as you climb. The journey to a deeper understanding of marketing effectiveness has four parts.

1. Assess: Establish a baseline by evaluating your current measurement approach.

2. Experiment: Strengthen measurement foundations and launch initial experiments.
3. Calibrate:Use experimental results to validate, tune and improve your measurement.
4. Operationalise: Make experimentation a recurring practice so decisions and investment are guided
   by incrementality.

Meta Keynote Resources: 

Introducing Meta Ads AI Connectors: Manage Your Meta Ads From the AI Tools You Already Use.

Measurement 360: Building a ‘suite of truth’ to capture the incremental impact of advertising.

Google X Tracksuit: Brand is the Moat

Google's Strategy & Insights Manager Angus Boulton and Data & Measurement Lead Eduardo Maia picked up the thread for the agentic search era. Their argument was that when an AI agent makes the recommendation, brand becomes the deciding factor. Consumers won't accept a non-preferred brand without pushing back, and they'll value trust four times more than the cheapest option on the table. Cue 'The Trust Line' - every purchase decision is now governed by an invisible frontier.

Building that trust comes down to four things: brand early and often, hook attention, make people feel something, then ask them to act. And Search - brand query growth is still one of the cleanest proxies for sales available.

Sam Brough, Head of Brand at Tracksuit, joined Angus and Eduardo for a fireside chat about the new Google X Tracksuit Return on Awareness Study and how brand correlates with share of Search gains.

High Data, Low Data Quick Takes

A good game's a fast game as they say, and to keep it punchy we introduced a series of high and low data quick takes with local marketing leaders Carolyn Luey from Contact Energy and Susan Benseman from ANZ Bank (high data) and Helen Bosley from Fletcher Living and Sarah Wood from realestate.co.nz (low data case study). 

Measurement Leaves the Screen

OOHMAA’s Kath Mitchell kicked off the afternoon with a “wake and shake” espressOOH martini - and a reminder that four out of five New Zealanders leave home each day. Last year, New Zealand’s Out of Home market was worth $233 million and grew nearly 10% year on year, yet historically it lacked a unified audience measurement currency.

The answer is knOOH: New Zealand’s independently operated standard for measuring Out of Home reach, frequency and impressions. knOOH uses a measurement approach known as Opportunity to See (OTS). It calculates how many people have a realistic opportunity to see an individual panel, or a combination of panels during a campaign period. Its mixed-model methodology brings together multiple data sources to build a model of how people move around New Zealand. Highly detailed spatial and time-based datasets are scaled using larger-volume data to represent the wider population.

All knOOH data and models are stored locally in New Zealand and managed independently by Mortal, a third-party data company with more than 10 years’ experience developing Out of Home audience measurement systems for the New Zealand market.

Kath brought the energy, and the coffee and vodka, before Tim Macmillan of Mortal led a live, interactive demonstration of knOOH in action. You can download the helpful knOOH resources referenced at MeasureUp below.

📸 See if you can spot yourself, or any of your work friends in the event photo gallery 

🎧 If you're more of a fan of audio on the go, you can listen to some of the highlights in the IAB NZ Insights Podcast thanks to the power of Google NotebookLM and AI.

Please note: This is an automatically generated AI podcast based on the event experience and not the direct perspectives of the presenters, organisations involved or IAB New Zealand. 

A big thank you to our sponsors Google, Meta and knOOH and to the IAB New Zealand Data, Privacy & Measurement Council team for bringing MeasureUp 2026 to life. A special thank you to Qassem Naim, Founder Team Circle and Council Chair and Travena Addenbrooke, Council Vice Chair for their leadership and expert panel moderation. 

Until next year 🎉 📚