Here is an uncomfortable finding for anyone building a 2027 marketing plan this month: audiences are warming to advertising, and marketers are growing less sure that theirs works.
That tension sits at the centre of Kantar’s Media Reactions study, published on 2 October and based on interviews with more than 800 senior marketers and 23,000 consumers. Only half of advertisers now feel they have the right balance between brand building and performance, down from 60 per cent a year ago. Confidence in the media mix slipped from 64 per cent to 57 per cent. And just 51 per cent say they are pulling actionable intelligence out of their data. Kantar’s own conclusion is blunt: the fix is sharper intelligence, not a bigger pile of data.
The hidden cost: The confidence gap
Call it the confidence gap: the distance between how much a team can measure and how sure it is about what to do next. It is easy to miss because every individual number looks healthy. Each platform reports its own engagement, its own attributed return and its own reach, and each one, read alone, says the money is working.
The trouble is that these numbers grade their own homework, and they often point the wrong way. Kantar’s creator research earlier this year found that platform engagement and real brand-building potential line up only about a third of the time. The number most teams use to pick creators misleads them two times out of three. Repeat that across search, social, retail media and video, and you get a dashboard that is busy, green and quietly uninformative.
Part of the gap is perception rather than performance. Kantar’s effectiveness data shows that channels working together drove 43 per cent of campaign performance between 2020 and 2025, up from 18 per cent before 2014. Marketers are getting better at making a fragmented mix pay. They just can’t see it clearly enough to defend it.
The moment it bites
Picture a regional head of marketing in Singapore in mid-October, three weeks from locking next year’s budget. Her quarterly review looks excellent. Paid social return on ad spend is up. Engagement on the creator programme has doubled. Cost per click fell in every market. Then the CFO asks the only question that matters: which of these moved revenue, and which can we cut?
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Nobody in the room can answer with confidence. Every channel can show a number that went up; none can show that the sales would not have happened anyway. So the budget rolls forward with a few percent shaved off everywhere, the same plan as last year, defended with the same slides.
That is the confidence gap turning into money. It is not one bad decision. It is a year of decisions nobody can explain.
The shift: A new channel nobody can measure yet
The gap is about to widen. Kantar finds that a net 75 per cent of marketers plan to increase investment in AI assistants in 2027, and 62 per cent expect generative AI to play a pivotal role in brand recommendations. Yet only 32 per cent of consumers use these assistants to research brands, and just 23 per cent trust what they recommend. Money is moving ahead of evidence.
The buy side already feels it. In the IAB’s outlook last month, 86 per cent of US buyers said they are changing how they measure media because of conversational AI and agents, and 45 per cent named comparing AI-driven and traditional customer journeys as their hardest measurement problem. Being found, cited and recommended in AI answers is turning into a goal in its own right, with no agreed way yet to count it.
What wins in 2027 is less measurement theatre and more signal discipline:
- Fewer, causal metrics. Pick the handful of numbers that track revenue or margin, and test them with holdouts instead of trusting each platform’s attribution.
- Prediction before spend. Score creative and audiences before the budget goes out, so the post-campaign report confirms a bet rather than explains it away.
- Category context. Read what competitors and audiences are doing across the market, not just your own funnel. A number only means something next to the market it sits in.
Why Southeast Asia feels it first
The confidence gap is wider here, for structural reasons. A regional team plans across half a dozen markets, several languages and a platform mix that changes at every border, from marketplaces to super-apps to messaging-led commerce. Global brands often hand local teams a direction from headquarters and a dashboard built for a single market, then ask them to defend spend line by line.
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Agencies carry the same load with fewer people. An independent shop pitching against a network rarely loses on ideas; it loses on the depth of the read it brings into the room. That is why the insight stacks agencies build now matter as much as their creative. Whoever can explain the category, the audience and the competitive moves fastest earns the right to say what the numbers mean.
How the gap gets closed
The teams closing the gap are not adding dashboards. They are changing what they look at before they spend. As the founder of SOMIN, I see the same pattern across brands and agencies: read the category first, find the few signals that predict outcomes, and let those signals set the plan.
Two cases from our own work show how this plays out, and both are shared here as examples of the approach, not as proof the product works.
At Mothercare Singapore, the local team was tracking more than 4,000 category ads a year by hand and still guessing which content would land with Singaporean parents. Benchmarking the category by engagement per post rather than by volume showed that content about the real challenges of parenthood earned roughly 39 engagements per post, against about seven for festive gifting. With that read in hand, the team reported that time spent on research and ideation fell by 80 per cent, and that audience segmentation became three times more refined.
SAMY, an independent creative agency, used a similar approach to pitch a UK hospitality group against larger networks. Instead of leading with concepts, it walked in with a read of the client’s competitive set and an audience the category had left unserved, and won a multi-million-pound retainer. The agency now gets a click-through prediction on its creative before media money moves, which it reports at 78 per cent accuracy.
The three-number test
None of this requires a bigger martech stack. It requires the discipline to retire the metrics that flatter and keep the few that predict, and the confidence to explain that choice out loud: to the CFO, to clients and to the market. The leaders who do that in public, with a steady voice and the data behind it, will set the terms everyone else gets measured by.
So before the 2027 plan is locked: if you had to cut your dashboard to three numbers tomorrow, which three would you keep, and would your CFO pick the same ones?
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The post Every dashboard is green. So why can’t anyone say what worked? appeared first on e27.