WPP Media’s Premjeet Sodhi flags “measurement framework” as missing link in brand effectiveness efforts

New Delhi: Premjeet Sodhi, Global Analytics Lead at WPP Media’s OpenX, has urged marketers and agency teams to step back from dashboards and “engineer” the link between media activity and brand impact by building a clear, robust measurement framework first.

In a short LinkedIn video, Sodhi framed the debate as a daily trade-off many teams struggle with. “Where do you spend more time today, on reporting or measurement?” he asked, distinguishing between reporting, which documents what media activity happened and measurement, which shows what happened to the brand as a result.

“Reporting is necessary, but so is hygiene,” Sodhi said. “It is measurement that really drives impact for your brand.”

Sodhi’s core argument was that measurement does not happen automatically, even when data volumes are high, and tools are sophisticated. Brands, he said, need to “engineer” the relationship between media outputs and business outcomes. The starting point for that engineering is a measurement framework that clearly defines what should be measured, when it should be measured and how it should be measured.

Connected by WPP Open, WPP Media positions itself as a global media collective that brings together media, data and production capabilities for advertisers. Against that backdrop, Sodhi’s message focused on process discipline as the foundation for better outcomes, rather than treating analytics as the first step.

“Jumping straight into analytics without this framework is suboptimal and sometimes even harmful for the brand,” he said, arguing that brands can end up answering the wrong questions with the wrong indicators if they skip the planning stage.

Sodhi described the toughest part of building a framework as deciding the questions the business needs answered and selecting brand KPIs that are genuinely relevant to those questions. He warned against defaulting to the most visible end metric.

Sales may appear to be the obvious KPI, he said, but the more relevant indicator for some businesses could be something else, such as new consumers. The implication, he added, is that teams need to choose KPIs “wisely” because that choice determines how measurement is designed and how results are interpreted.

From there, Sodhi moved to the tools and techniques that brands commonly debate. He listed attribution, incrementality testing and market mix models as approaches that can be used to connect media and outcomes, while cautioning against treating any one approach as a silver bullet.

“There is no single right answer,” he said, adding that the right approach is often a combination of methods and should be driven by the KPI, the speed at which decisions need to be made and the nature of the available data.

The broader industry debate Sodhi referenced has been shaped by the limitations of single-method measurement, especially in environments where signals are fragmented across platforms. In a recent note on retail media measurement, WPP Media has also pointed to moving beyond siloed, last-touch approaches and using incrementality-based decisioning to connect measurement to action faster.

Sodhi acknowledged that building a measurement framework is not easy. It requires time, cost and planning, he said, but can materially change how brands learn, optimise and invest.

“Putting down a measurement framework needs a lot of work,” he said. “It is time-consuming, expensive and deserves planning, but it is a game-changer for the brand.”

To close the video, Sodhi reiterated his key takeaway: reporting is essential hygiene, but measurement is what creates impact. A strong measurement framework, he said, is the “starting point” and “the most important piece” for brands that want measurement to shape decisions rather than simply validate activity after the fact.