How We Rebuilt Our Approach: Attention, MER, Incrementality

April 2021.

Apple rolls out iOS 14.5 and quietly rewrites the rules of digital marketing overnight. Tracking breaks, reporting wobbles, and every Meta dashboard suddenly looks like it needs a stiff drink.

Within 90 days, the story is familiar: reported conversions are down, costs are up, and nobody can quite agree how much of that is real and how much is just lost signal. Every CMO has the same conversation with their CFO that quarter:

“The numbers look different. The algorithm changed. We’re adjusting how we measure.”

Some agencies sat down with their clients, rebuilt their measurement frameworks, and stress‑tested their assumptions.

Most waited for the platforms to “fix it” and hoped for the best.

Three years on, a surprising number of brands are still using the measurement model they had before iOS14. Same last‑click mindset. Same platform‑reported ROAS. Same hope that the algorithm is quietly doing the right thing in the background.

It isn’t.

The Brands That Pulled Ahead

The organisations that treated iOS14 as a forcing function did something very different.

They stopped asking, “What does this platform say?” and started asking, “What is actually true?”

They:

• Stopped grading each channel on its own exam paper and shifted up to blended, full‑funnel metrics like MER and profit.

• Started running proper incrementality tests to separate “nice dashboard” from “actual business impact.”

• Stopped treating pixel and SDK data as the single source of truth and started treating it as one signal alongside first‑party data, analytics, and finance.

Those brands are quietly compounding media efficiency. They know where their spend is genuinely incremental, where attention actually turns into revenue, and where it’s just noise.

The ones that waited? They’re spending more to reach the same people, watching retargeting pools shrink, and wondering why cost per acquisition keeps drifting north while the platforms insist everything is “learning” and “performing as expected.”

iOS14 Wasn’t a Crisis. It Was a Question.

From where we sit as a marketing and media agency, iOS14 wasn’t just a privacy update.

It was a very direct question:

Do you actually know what your media is doing?

Back in 2021, most brands didn’t have a confident answer. Plenty still don’t.

At the same time, attention has never been harder to earn. Fragmented channels, shorter attention spans, and more competition mean you can’t afford to optimise blindly to whatever your tracking stack happens to pick up this week.

If you don’t know where attention is being won, and you don’t know which of that attention is truly incremental, you’re driving your media strategy with a fogged‑up windscreen.

How We Rebuilt Our Approach: Attention, MER, Incrementality

In response, we rebuilt our approach to planning and optimisation around three pillars: attention, MER, and incrementality.

1. Attention first, attribution second

We start with attention.

• Are we reaching the right people?

• Are we holding their attention long enough for anything meaningful to happen?

• Are we doing it consistently across channels?

We plan and optimise to win meaningful attention in priority audiences first. Then we connect that attention to business outcomes using blended performance metrics, not just whatever a single platform’s pixel manages to see after privacy filters, ad blockers, and consent banners.

Attribution still matters, but it comes after attention, not before it.

2. MER as the shared language for CMOs and CFOs

Next, we look at Marketing Efficiency Ratio (MER) as the shared language between marketing and finance.

Instead of obsessing over one channel’s ROAS in isolation, we:

• Track total revenue against total marketing investment.

• Use MER as the “control panel” for portfolio‑level efficiency.

• Drill into channels and campaigns only once we know the overall system is working.

This means CMOs and CFOs can finally look at the same North Star. It also reduces the temptation to pause genuinely incremental channels just because their in‑platform attribution looks messy post‑iOS14.

3. Incrementality as the reality check

Finally, we treat incrementality as our reality check.

We use:

• Structured holdout tests.

• Geo‑experiments.

• Time‑based tests and matched‑market approaches.

The goal is simple: isolate what’s truly additive. If a channel stops pulling its weight once you strip away attribution bias and tracking gaps, we’ll see it, and we’ll fix it.

Incrementality doesn’t replace day‑to‑day optimisation, but it does stop you from making big budget decisions based on partial or misleading data.

What This Looks Like in Practice

For most brands, this doesn’t mean throwing everything out and starting again. It usually looks more like:

• Reframing reporting so the top of the deck is attention, MER and incrementality insights, not platform screenshots.

• Using attention metrics (view time, scroll depth, engagement with key creatives, completion rates) to guide creative and media decisions, rather than only cost‑per‑click or cost‑per‑lead.

• Building a simple testing roadmap so you’re always learning something: a quarterly incrementality test, a couple of creative or audience tests each month, and an annual deep dive on your measurement stack.

• Getting finance in the loop early, so the definitions of “good” and “profitable” are shared, not debated after the fact.

It’s less “rip and replace” and more “clear the fog and upgrade the dashboard.”

So… Where Are You Now?

If you rebuilt your measurement framework after iOS14, I’d love to know:

• What changed for you?

• How has it shifted the way you think about attention, MER and incrementality?

• Where are you still frustrated?

And if you haven’t rebuilt it yet, be honest with yourself for a moment:

• Is it an internal buy‑in challenge?

• A data and capability challenge?

• Or simply the reality that there are too many priorities and not enough hours in the week?

Wherever you’re starting from, the next step is the same: get clear on where you’re winning attention, how that attention turns into incremental revenue, and what your media is actually doing, not just what the dashboard says it’s doing.

If you’d like a second pair of eyes on your current measurement and attention strategy, this is the kind of problem we love helping CMOs and heads of marketing untangle.

So, if you’d like a quick, no‑nonsense review of your current attention and measurement setup, you can book a 30‑minute session with our team and walk away with a simple, prioritised plan.