Marketing measurement isn’t just about crunching numbers, it’s about uncovering the stories data tells. For Vishnu, part of the Measurement Consulting team at Funnel, this is not just a vision, it’s his mission. In this blog post, Vishnu shares his career journey, explains the importance of marketing measurement, and offers insights into its future of industry.

Can you tell us about your background and what led you to pursue a career in marketing measurement?

My journey into marketing measurement began unexpectedly. I started my career in 2004 as a software engineer at Infosys, Bangalore, working on algorithmic trade processing after earning a computer engineering degree from Kerala University. Two years later, I moved to Manhattan, New York, where I spent four years with a leading investment bank, developing high-performance, scalable electronic trading solutions for equities and mortgage-backed securities. This experience honed my skills in performance tuning and handling large datasets.

At Infosys, I transitioned to e-commerce, applying my expertise in scalability to lead a performance tuning initiative for a UK-based grocery e-commerce website. I also spearheaded a managed services initiative for a Fortune 100 home improvement retailer to optimize their e-commerce operations.

It was during this phase that I discovered marketing measurement, initially through projects with large e-commerce clients. Captivated by the field, I sought to expand my understanding of how technology drives ROI. This led me to pursue an MBA at the Indian Institute of Management, Bangalore, one of APAC’s top business schools.

In 2015, I joined Visual IQ, an emerging player in marketing measurement. There, I standardised and enhanced their Multi-Touch Attribution (MTA) solution, streamlining onboarding processes. Later, as part of the Subject Matter Expert group, I helped institutionalise domain knowledge in marketing measurement.

After Visual IQ’s acquisition by Nielsen in 2018, I led the global technical solution delivery and automation organisation for the marketing effectiveness group. My team focused on boosting product adoption and building trust in MTA and Marketing Mix Modelling (MMM) metrics while expanding into brand awareness and upper-funnel measurement.

By 2023, I had worked in seven cities worldwide but not mainland Europe. When my spouse took a role in Germany, we seized the chance to explore Europe as a family. I joined Adtriba as their sole marketing measurement partner, gaining deep insights into European clients and contrasting approaches in the USA, India, and Europe.In summer 2024, Funnel acquired Adtriba, marking the beginning of my Funnel journey.

For someone unfamiliar with the field, how would you explain marketing measurement, and why is it so crucial for businesses?

Marketing measurement is essentially about understanding what drives your sales and how your marketing efforts contribute to that. It helps businesses find the right mix of marketing activities and non-marketing factors, such as discounts or store expansions, that impact their success.

Marketing efforts can generally be divided into three categories:

But it doesn’t stop there. Measurement also considers external factors like seasonality or weather, which can skew performance metrics. For example, lower-funnel tactics might look exceptionally effective during Black Friday or Christmas simply because they capitalise on existing seasonal demand. Understanding these nuances ensures businesses allocate their budgets wisely and get the best return on ad spend.

By using tools like Multi-Touch Attribution (MTA) and Marketing Mix Modelling (MMM), companies can optimize their strategies, make smarter decisions, and ultimately achieve better results.

What does a normal day look like for you in your role?

The day usually starts with listening to podcasts or reading during my 45 minute commute to the office.  This period helps me get into the right frame of mind for the day and also helps me stay in touch with the latest developments in the business and tech world.

Once in office, I start with a quick review of emails to identify any pressing issues and key topics to bring up during our measurement consulting daily.  Our daily meeting is an opportunity to decide collectively the priorities for the day and also call out any blockers that we have in our specific customer or process initiatives. Then, I dive into client projects, bringing their data into our modelling environment and running our measurement models. The work essentially combines consulting & modelling.

The role involves understanding the client’s media mix & key marketing KPIs, advisory on data integration, running client-specific models, evaluating metrics like MAPE (Mean Absolute Percentage Error) and R-squared (Coefficient of Determination), and ensuring that the models accurately reflect the client’s sales data. These metrics are vital in ensuring both the precision and relevance of our predictions:

Once the insights are ready, I work on translating them into actionable recommendations. This might involve advising clients on reallocating budgets, adjusting strategies, or testing small-scale changes to validate the models’ predictions. A significant part of my role is also about ensuring the models are robust. Since they’re stochastic, it’s crucial to test and validate their outputs to ensure they provide meaningful and actionable insights. Another key aspect of the role is creating a feedback loop to the product so that the feedback from clients influences product development.

Adtriba was acquired by Funnel this summer. How has the transition been? Any challenges or highlights?

The transition has been both exciting and a learning experience. Funnel is a much larger organization than Adtriba, which was a smaller, more specialised company. One of the biggest differences lies in the target users. Funnel’s primary users are often semi-technical individuals focused on data aggregation and visualisation, while Adtriba’s users were more performance-oriented marketers and brand managers.

This difference has required us to adapt and align our solutions with Funnel’s broader offerings. One of the highlights has been integrating our expertise in marketing measurement with Funnel’s strong data visualisation capabilities, creating a more comprehensive solution for clients.

The process has been collaborative, with trips to Stockholm and ongoing meetings helping bridge the gap between teams. While there are still challenges in fully aligning our workflows and strategies, the progress so far has been encouraging, and the potential for innovation is immense.

What do you think the future of marketing measurement looks like?

The future of marketing measurement is incredibly promising. I see it evolving into a more standardized and widely adopted practice, much like investor communication in the financial industry. This concept of “cost mutualization” means that businesses will increasingly rely on independent vendors, like Funnel, to provide robust and scalable measurement solutions. 

Over time, it's likely that the entire industry may converge to a few highly capable end-to-end self-service solutions which could provide marketing measurement and optimization at a reasonable cost.  

As these solutions become more sophisticated, they’ll also become more accessible, enabling businesses of all sizes to optimize their marketing spend and achieve better results. The focus will shift from merely collecting data to extracting actionable insights and proving the value of marketing investments.

With advancements in AI and machine learning, we’ll see more predictive and automated tools that can adapt to rapidly changing market conditions. For Funnel, this represents a significant opportunity to lead the industry by combining powerful analytics with market leading data integration capability, ultimately helping clients maximize their return on ad spend.

Interested in joining Funnel? Explore our current job openings!