How Brands Are Measuring Real Marketing Impact

Industry & Competitive Context

By the mid-2010s, global advertisers faced a measurement crisis rooted in the rapid, largely unaudited shift of ad budgets into programmatic digital media. Digital inventory was being bought and sold through long, opaque supply chains involving multiple intermediaries, ad exchanges, and data brokers, with limited independent verification of whether ads were actually seen by real human audiences. This created three documented industry-wide problems: ad fraud (including bot traffic), poor viewability (ads technically served but never visible on a user’s screen), and brand safety risk (ads appearing next to inappropriate or harmful content). Procter & Gamble, the world’s largest advertiser by spend at the time, and Airbnb, a high-growth digital-native marketplace, each confronted this environment from different competitive positions but arrived at a shared strategic conclusion: marketing spend had to be justified with verifiable evidence of impact rather than assumed effectiveness.

P&G operated in the mature, highly competitive consumer packaged goods sector, where its brands such as Tide, Pampers, Gillette, and Olay depended on mass reach advertising to defend market share against private label and digitally native challenger brands. Airbnb operated in the online travel and hospitality marketplace sector, competing with Booking.com, Expedia, and traditional hotel chains, in an industry defined by high customer acquisition costs through performance marketing channels such as paid search and social advertising.

Brand Situation Prior to Measurement Overhaul

Procter & Gamble’s chief brand officer, Marc Pritchard, disclosed in public addresses to the Interactive Advertising Bureau (IAB) and the Association of National Advertisers (ANA) in 2017 that the company’s digital media supply chain was, in his words, “murky at best and fraudulent at worst.” He stated that P&G was transacting across inconsistent viewability standards, with limited third-party audits, hidden rebates in agency contracts, and exposure to bot and methbot fraud. P&G also disclosed that data on mobile newsfeed advertising showed an average ad view time of only 1.7 seconds, indicating that a significant share of paid digital exposure was not meaningfully reaching consumers.

Airbnb’s situation emerged under different circumstances. According to statements made by CEO Brian Chesky on the company’s earnings calls and in its IPO-related SEC filings, Airbnb had built its growth substantially on performance marketing, increasing marketing spend by 474 million dollars in 2019 alone, of which 314 million dollars was allocated to performance marketing and 160 million dollars to brand marketing. When the COVID-19 pandemic caused bookings to fall roughly 80 percent within eight weeks in early 2020, Airbnb suspended nearly all marketing spend, cutting close to a billion dollars in annualized marketing investment, according to Chesky’s own public remarks. This abrupt, enforced stop created an unplanned real-world test of what portion of the company’s traffic and bookings were genuinely dependent on paid marketing.

Strategic Objective

P&G’s publicly stated objective, articulated repeatedly by Pritchard between 2017 and 2018, was to make media transparency and audience measurement non-negotiable conditions of doing business, so that marketing investment could be tied to verified reach and viewability rather than inventory volume. The company set out to adopt a single, independently accredited viewability standard, eliminate wasteful or fraudulent impressions, and reallocate savings toward channels with demonstrably higher reach efficiency.

Airbnb’s objective, as described by Chesky and chief financial officer Dave Stephenson on quarterly earnings calls, was to determine how much of its traffic and bookings were organically brand-driven versus dependent on paid performance marketing, and to permanently rebalance its marketing mix based on that evidence rather than historical spending patterns.

Campaign Architecture & Execution

P&G’s execution centered on a media transparency initiative rather than a single creative campaign. The company required that, by the end of 2017, all of its media partners adopt the Media Rating Council’s (MRC) validated viewability standard, defined as at least 50 percent of an ad’s pixels being in view for a minimum of one second for display ads and two seconds for video. P&G also mandated accredited third-party audience measurement verification across its media buys and adopted the guidelines of the Trustworthy Accountability Group, a body backed by the ANA, IAB, and the American Association of Advertising Agencies.

Based on the transparency data this generated, P&G reduced digital ad spending with several major digital platforms by between 20 and 50 percent during 2017, cutting roughly 100 million dollars between April and June and a further 100 million dollars over the remainder of the year, for a total digital ad spend reduction of approximately 200 million dollars for the year, as confirmed in Pritchard’s remarks reported by Reuters, Marketing Week, and The Drum. Separately, P&G announced a restructuring of its agency relationships in January 2018, reducing its roster of agency partners by roughly 50 percent and targeting savings of approximately 400 million dollars through a new, leaner agency model. The company had also previously disclosed a broader five-year plan to reduce total marketing spend by approximately 2 billion dollars.

Airbnb’s execution was driven by the pandemic rather than a planned pilot. Having cut nearly all marketing spend in early 2020, the company observed its traffic recovery over subsequent months before resuming any marketing investment. On its first earnings call as a public company in February 2021, Chesky and Stephenson disclosed that the company would make a permanent, structural shift away from performance marketing and toward brand marketing and public relations, launching its first large-scale brand campaign in five years, titled “Made Possible by Hosts,” in February 2021. The company reported that total sales and marketing spend fell by 662 million dollars year over year, of which 541 million dollars came from performance marketing (such as paid search and online bidding) and 121 million dollars from brand marketing (such as television and Olympic Games sponsorship).

Positioning & Consumer Insight

P&G’s underlying insight, as stated publicly by Pritchard, was that digital reach without genuine human viewability was not marketing effectiveness but waste, and that marketers had allowed media intermediaries to “grade their own homework” without independent accountability. The company’s response reframed its positioning from a digital-spend-maximizing advertiser to an industry standard-setter demanding verified, audited media quality, encapsulated in Pritchard’s repeated calls for the industry to move away from “archaic” trading practices toward consistent, auditable measurement.

Airbnb’s insight, as stated by Chesky, was that the strength of an already well-established consumer brand could sustain traffic and bookings without heavy reliance on paid performance channels. Chesky told investors that at the end of May and early June 2020, the company had the same volume of US bookings as the prior year “without any marketing, zero marketing whatsoever.” By the fourth quarter of 2020, Stephenson and Chesky disclosed that traffic had returned to 95 percent of 2019 levels without any marketing spend, and that more than 90 percent of traffic in that quarter was direct or unpaid.

Media & Channel Strategy

P&G’s publicly disclosed channel reallocation moved savings from underperforming digital inventory into channels assessed as offering greater verified reach, including television, audio, and e-commerce advertising; Pritchard stated this shift helped increase overall media reach by approximately 10 percent. P&G also paused advertising on YouTube during this period following brand safety concerns about ads appearing next to inappropriate content, a widely reported move at the time, though the company did not publicly disclose the dollar value of this specific pause separately from its broader digital spending reduction.

Airbnb’s channel strategy shifted from performance marketing formats such as paid search and online bidding toward brand marketing formats such as television advertising and major sponsorships, including its continued association with the Olympic Games. Dave Stephenson stated on an earnings call that performance marketing remained “an important lever” that the company would continue to use “where it makes economic sense to do so,” indicating a rebalancing rather than a full elimination of performance channels.

Business & Brand Outcomes

For P&G, the documented outcome of the 2017 digital spend reduction was that the company did not report a negative impact on sales as a result of the cuts; multiple contemporaneous trade press reports citing company statements noted that reach increased by roughly 10 percent despite the lower digital spend. In its fiscal year 2018 results, disclosed through its official earnings release, P&G reported net sales of 66.8 billion dollars, a 3 percent increase versus the prior year, with organic sales growth of 1 percent for the full year, against a company target range of 2 to 3 percent organic growth. No verified public information directly and quantitatively attributes a specific portion of this sales performance to the digital media transparency initiative; P&G’s public disclosures describe the initiatives as parallel efforts within a broader demand-creation and productivity program rather than a controlled, isolated test.

For Airbnb, the documented outcomes are more directly tied to the marketing measurement exercise because the pandemic created a natural, publicly disclosed before-and-after comparison. The company’s own executives stated that traffic levels recovered to 95 percent of 2019 levels in the fourth quarter of 2020 without marketing spend, and that over 90 percent of that quarter’s traffic was direct or unpaid. In the first quarter of 2021, Airbnb disclosed that it cut sales and marketing spend by 28 percent year over year to 229 million dollars while traffic levels remained similar to 2019 levels despite an overall marketing spend reduction of roughly 50 percent. Subsequent public reporting on Airbnb’s financial results noted that the company achieved its most profitable fourth quarter on record approximately two years after the shift, with executives publicly attributing part of this performance to the move from performance-driven customer acquisition toward brand investment and the strength of repeat guest retention, which Stephenson described as a long-standing driver of company growth.

Strategic Implications

Both cases illustrate a broader, verifiable shift in how major brands sought to measure marketing impact during this period: a move away from accepting delivered impressions or spend levels as proxies for effectiveness, and toward demanding independently verifiable evidence, whether through third-party audited viewability standards in P&G’s case, or through a real-world withdrawal-and-recovery test of marketing dependency in Airbnb’s case. P&G’s approach represents a supply-side measurement discipline, focused on auditing what was being bought before assessing its value. Airbnb’s approach represents a demand-side natural experiment, in which an external shock inadvertently revealed the brand’s embedded equity and the diminishing marginal return of incremental performance spend.

A common thread across both publicly documented cases is that senior executives were willing to disclose, through investor calls and industry speeches, that a meaningful share of prior marketing expenditure may not have been generating proportionate impact, and that correcting this required structural changes to measurement standards or marketing mix rather than incremental budget adjustments. Both companies also stopped short of claiming precise return-on-investment figures for their respective interventions in public disclosures, which is itself an instructive data point for marketing practitioners: even sophisticated, well-resourced organizations with direct access to proprietary data did not publicly quantify a single, audited “true ROI” figure for these initiatives, instead relying on directional indicators such as reach, traffic share, and sales growth trends reported through standard financial and trade channels.