AdExchanger Talks – "In Platforms We Trust?"

Date: February 10, 2026
Host: Allison Schiff
Guest: Ty Ahmad-Taylor, Chief Product Officer at Kantar

Episode Overview

This episode explores how trust, transparency, and technology shape advertising and measurement in a platform-dominated world. Allison Schiff and Ty Ahmad-Taylor discuss Ty's unique career arc from journalism to leadership in walled gardens (Meta, Snap) and now, data analytics at Kantar. They examine the persistent challenge of achieving verifiable, full-funnel, cross-platform measurement; the evolving role of AI and creative effectiveness; and how brands can, or cannot, trust the numbers provided by powerful platforms.

Key Discussion Points & Insights

Ty Ahmad-Taylor: A Multifaceted Background

• Ty shares personal tidbits (cooking school, journalism, product roles at Snap, Meta, and now Kantar) illustrating his interdisciplinary approach to business and data.

  • [02:45] Ty: "I took a year off from work to go to cooking school... I was trying to demystify cooking... What you learned very quickly is that cooking is much more art than science. Baking, however, is just direct science."

• Transitioned from infographics journalist at The New York Times to an early internet startup, then deep ad tech roles—bringing a broad, context-driven perspective to measurement.

From Walled Gardens to Third-Party Measurement

• Trust, Objective Reality & Methodological Conflict

  • Walled gardens (Meta, Snap) have opened up slightly for measurement, but still often ask marketers to trust their numbers without offering full transparency.
  • [09:27] Ty: "The different measurement methodologies can sometimes be in conflict with one another... Multi Touch attribution and last click attribution... sometimes yield differing views of objective reality."
  • Cross-channel consumer journeys muddy attribution—who gets the credit when a consumer sees multiple ads across platforms?
  • GA (Google Analytics) dominance leads to a bias toward last-click attribution.

• Is There a Path to Shared, Verifiable Truth?

  • Ty notes that while platforms aspire to objectivity, fractured data models make universal truth tough.
  • Acknowledges it's a "hard problem to solve" due to varying incentives and data standards.

Kantar & Modern Brand Measurement

• Company Evolution

  • Kantar moves beyond classic survey and panel research, innovating with AI, data integrations, and platform partnerships.
  • [12:50] Ty: "Our primary product is brand guidance... We allow people to understand how media spend affects sales with our Lyft ROI product... We've got a product called Link AI... helps you optimize creative using Kantar's intellectual property around ads that are meaningful, different, and salient."

• Brand vs. Performance: A False Divide

  • Full-funnel (top, mid, bottom) effectiveness is increasingly important as ‘performance’ brands embrace brand-building, and vice versa.
  • [15:07] Ty: "Companies that have historically been performance brands are now spending on commercials... Companies that have been brand marketers are thinking about lower funnel performance..."
  • Introduces the phrase "brandformance"—the convergence of brand and performance strategies.

• Speed, Culture, and "Jobs to Be Done"

  • Kantar’s focus: deliver faster, culturally relevant insights, leveraging AI and new data methods.
  • [16:28] Ty: "How do we get results into the hands of our clients as fast as possible, and how do you leverage artificial intelligence...? The framework in which we envelop those is really through jobs to be done."

Modern Measurement Challenges

• Cross-Platform Holism & Privacy

  • The "bazillion dollar question": How to stitch together a holistic view across TV, CTV, social, and retail media without double-counting?
  • Privacy laws (GDPR, CCPA, ATT/iOS) restrict deterministic measurement and force marketers to accept probabilistic models.
  • [20:25] Ty: "You have to assess their comfort levels with probabilistic understanding... I don't think that there's 100% truth. What we can get is an approximation..."

• Is Directional Data 'Good Enough'?

  • Marketers prioritize timely, actionable direction along with growing pressure for faster insights.
  • [22:49] Ty: "The amount of compute capabilities... make speed and the return of the results much easier to achieve."

Creative Effectiveness & New Signals

• Going Beyond GRPs

  • Kantar leverages new signals for creative effectiveness: micro-engagements (pauses, rewinds), neural/eye tracking, emotional response.

  • [28:54] Ty: "The computational ability to understand the linkage of these things to actual effectiveness has never been easier... The more we can measure, the more we can determine what yields superior outcomes."

  • Not all signals are causative; distinguishing correlation from causation is critical.

• The Attention Zeitgeist

  • True attention is more than 'viewability'; Kantar now measures the intersection of brand lift and attention/viewability for deeper insight.
  • [30:56] Ty: "We believe [we've] cut through the clutter by providing deterministic insights about attention by combining attention and viewability with brand lift..."

• Audience Behavior Trends

  • Rise of "second screening" means content strategies (e.g., Netflix intentionally producing 'low attention' shows) and advertising must adapt.

Privacy Shifts: Cookies, First Party Data, Clean Rooms & AI

• Cookies: Not Dead Yet

  • despite talk of their demise, cookies remain a vector in measurement—generational differences noted in privacy attitudes.
  • [34:58] Ty: "I think that they still play a role in the ad ecosystem... It's just another measurement vector."
  • Probabilistic models are on the rise as tracking gets tougher; incumbents with more data have a growing advantage.

• AI & Behavioral Inference

  • AI increasingly helps infer user characteristics (e.g., age verification by click behavior) in privacy-compliant ways.
  • [37:20] Ty: "That's exceptionally smart... At previous employers we had the ability to impute age based upon who you were associating with."

• First-Party Data & Clean Rooms

  • Kantar partners with Snowflake for data clean rooms, enabling secure, privacy-compliant collaboration.

  • [38:30] Ty: "We use [clean rooms] for measurement purposes... That's a wave of the future."

  • Clean rooms shifting from "hot product" to infrastructure feature—now "just a data exchange mechanism."

  • [40:23] Ty: "It's a data exchange mechanism, broadly thinking..."

The Future: Organizational Change & Measurement Disruption

• MarTech Talent & Mindset

  • Tech alone is insufficient—brands must develop an internal measurement mindset/capability.
  • [41:31] Ty: "[Brands must] get to a place of comfort with being much more hands off the steering wheel with regards to where and how your budget is spent."
  • AI will eventually allow brands to simply input company name and business objectives, and platforms will handle everything else.

• Meta & Google MMM (Marketing Mix Modeling) Tools

  • Scale and compute power allow them to deliver faster, deeper insights than smaller providers.
  • [43:53] Ty: "Both give you the heft you want in understanding funnel penetration... and can turn it around much faster..."

Glancing Ahead: 1, 3, and 5 Years Out

• Year 1:

  • Retail Media Networks will become a concrete, central part of brand and conversion planning.
  • [45:32] Ty: "A year from now RMNs are just going to have a larger role, I think, in terms of how people allocate spend."

• Year 3:

  • Possible leap in outdoor/digital OOH personalization—Minority Report-style dynamic ads powered by AI.
  • Regulatory factors might accelerate or restrict this shift.

• Year 5:

  • Fully optimized, real-time ad spend allocation across all channels—self-optimizing, automated, and dynamic.
  • [47:26] Ty: "I think optimized ad spend allocation in real time across channels will very much be in vogue… I expect the problem to be solved."

Notable Quotes & Memorable Moments

Cooking as Attribution:

• [04:03] Ty: "Favorites based upon what I would call in the measurement industry as, you know, last touch attribution. So, the last thing that I've made and so the last thing that I've made that I really enjoy is delicata squash with apples and pumpkin seeds..."

Measurement Reality Check:

• [09:27] Ty: "Different measurement methodologies can conflict... Multi Touch attribution and last click attribution... sometimes yield differing views of objective reality..."

On “Brandformance”:

• [15:55] Ty: "There's this awful phrase that I use... brandformance, where you're thinking about pulling people through the entire funnel... We're in the infancy days of being able to measure that accurately..."

Attention vs. Actual Impact:

• [30:56] Ty: "We believe [we] cut through the clutter by... combining attention and viewability with brand lift."

Cookies – Still Here:

• [34:58] Ty: "Cookies... they're just the cockroaches of Signal. So are they still part of your mix for measurement? Absolutely..."

Clean Rooms:

• [40:23] Ty: "It's a data exchange mechanism... it's just a feature of data exchange."

On Automation & Trusting the Platform:

• [41:31] Ty: "One of my former employers said... 'give me the name of your company, give me some money and then get out of the way.' I don't think that we're that far away from that."

Timestamps for Important Segments

• [02:22] — Ty’s background: Cooking to journalism to product
• [09:27] — The measurement “honor system” & walled gardens
• [12:50] — Kantar’s evolution & AI product ecosystem
• [16:28] — Mandate at Kantar: Speed and cultural relevance
• [20:25] — Cross-platform measurement & privacy limits
• [28:54] — Modern creative measurement (micro engagements, neural data)
• [30:56] — Attention: How Kantar defines and measures it
• [34:58] — Cookies' continued role & generational perspectives
• [38:30] — First-party data, clean rooms, and commoditization
• [41:31] — Organizational change & trusting automation
• [43:53] — Perspective on Meta & Google's MMM tools
• [45:32] — One, three, five years out: Predictions for measurement disruption

Tone & Language

The exchange is candid, intellectually curious, and seasoned with small jokes and pop culture references. Ty is transparent about the limits of current tech, skeptical of buzzwords (“brandformance,” “phygital”), and advocates for a pragmatic, data-driven, and culturally awake approach to measurement.

Summary Takeaways

• Absolute measurement truth across platforms is likely impossible; approximation and transparency about methods are key.
• Speed, enabled by AI and computation, is now as important as accuracy.
• Attention and creative effectiveness are being redefined via new signals, but not all data is equally predictive.
• The future: More automation, reliance on probabilistic models for privacy, and real-time, cross-channel optimization are inevitable—but trust in platforms’ data will remain a central debate.

For listeners looking for hands-on insights, practical examples, and honest assessment of the measurement and attribution landscape, this episode is a standout, blending expertise with a human touch and a dash of culinary inspiration.