Adsquare vs mediasmart

Digital Audio Expands Into Lower-Funnel Performance Marketing

In an interview with ADZINE, Ina Börner explains how digital audio advertising is moving beyond its traditional branding role into measurable performance marketing across the mid and lower funnel. She clarifies that digital audio encompasses not only classic audio spots but also sponsored ads, host-read ads, and podcasts, and that 'performance' does not automatically mean purchase—measurable outcomes are key. Börner details how her company works with third-party measurement partners such as Okube, Veritonic, Adsquare, Yougov, and Happydemics to measure ad recall, consideration, drive-to-web, drive-to-store, and purchase effects. She emphasizes that creative quality is critical and discusses the use of AI for targeting, contextual analysis, and creative review, as well as Dynamic Creative Optimization to tailor spots by time, audience, and usage context. The company currently still uses human voices for production.

• Digital audio advertising can be deployed for mid- and lower-funnel performance goals with measurable outcomes.
• Measurement partners include Okube (drive-to-store/purchase), Veritonic (measurement), Adsquare (geo-data), Yougov (brand surveys), and Happydemics (brand lift).
• Ina Börner highlights Dynamic Creative Optimization (DCO) to tailor audio spots by time of day, audience, or usage situation.

The Outcomes Era: Tying Media Spend to Real Outcomes

Tom Laband of Adsquare argues the advertising industry is in an "outcomes era" where every marketing investment — brand or performance — must prove commercial impact. Performance measurement matured through affiliate marketing, CPC and programmatic systems, while brand activity historically relied on soft proxies; that distinction is collapsing as CFOs demand hard KPIs. Measurement is being complicated by signal erosion from GDPR, Apple’s App Tracking Transparency and the decline of third-party cookies. Partial fixes include clean rooms, CDPs, MMM and retail media (which embeds purchase outcomes in inventory), but most transactions still occur offline. Laband identifies the online-to-offline measurement gap as the key frontier and highlights AI-driven predictive audience models and synthetic control experiments as next steps to connect media dollars to real-world business outcomes.

• Author Tom Laband (Adsquare) says the industry is in an "outcomes era" where all marketing must demonstrate commercial impact.
• Performance marketing historically became measurable via affiliate marketing, cost-per-click models, Google Analytics and programmatic bidding.
• Privacy changes — GDPR, Apple's App Tracking Transparency and the decline of third-party cookies — have eroded identity signals used for digital attribution.

Removal of Affle parent company leadership section from mediasmart About page

The 'Affle 3i' section featuring Affle executives (Anuj Khanna Sohum, Kapil Bhutani, Charles Yong, Viraj Sinh) has been deleted, and image alt text changed from 'Life At Affle' to 'Global Ad Networks' across multiple profiles, indicating a shift in branding emphasis away from the parent company.