Claritas has been part of the marketing infrastructure for more than 50 years best known for pioneering audience segmentation models like PRIZM Premier. But according to Cort Irish, VP of Marketing and Communications, the company’s evolution mirrors a bigger shift in what marketing teams actually need: not just targeting, but proof. Not just insights, but action.

Speaking from POSSIBLE 2025, Irish laid out why Claritas has expanded from segmentation into real-time measurement and optimization and why marketers still treat measurement as an end-stage task, when it should be the starting point of campaign strategy.

For decades, Claritas helped marketers define audiences with precision. But over the past eight years, that role has expanded. Today, the company offers what Irish described as a closed-loop marketing model, one that connects audience segmentation to activation, attribution, and continuous feedback.

Their evolution wasn’t just a platform play, it was a response to a structural gap in the market. Brands were getting better at identifying who to target, but struggled to tie performance back to channel-level effectiveness or creative impact. Claritas began building tools to fill that gap, tools that let marketers go beyond reach and frequency and start optimizing in real time, across the full media mix.

One of the most persistent problems in measurement, Irish explained, is the continued dominance of last-touch attribution even in environments claiming to use multi-touch models.

It’s still common for the last-clicked digital action (like a branded Google search) to receive all the credit for a conversion, while earlier exposures, a podcast ad, a TV spot, or display impression are ignored. Claritas’ measurement model, built on deterministic methodology, assigns impact weight to each touchpoint, even across formats like radio and linear TV that are often excluded from digital-first attribution.

This approach isn’t just philosophically different. It changes how marketers value creative, media placement, and channel strategy because it reflects the actual influence each element had on the outcome.

Claritas doesn’t just report on what worked. Its goal is to feed those results directly back into the system. That means helping brands rebalance channel weights mid-campaign, test creative shifts, or identify when an audience segment is underperforming.

Much of that feedback loop is now powered by embedded AI from dynamic audience optimization to creative rotation and, soon, media mix recommendations. But the core remains the same: decisions must be based on clear, campaign-specific KPIs. Whether the goal is revenue, form fills, or CRM growth, optimization only matters when grounded in measurable, outcome-based signals.

As retail media networks become a default part of the media mix, the complexity of measurement has grown. Claritas supports many of these platforms directly helping them prove impact to advertisers using the same cross-channel model it offers to brands.

But beyond technical complexity, Irish sees a broader shift: the CFO is becoming a central stakeholder in marketing discussions. Budgets are under scrutiny, and CMOs are increasingly being asked to justify spend using the same metrics finance teams use to evaluate other functions.

Marketing teams that succeed, he argued, are the ones that understand what the CFO is looking at and proactively align on shared KPIs. It's no longer enough to talk about impressions and engagement. Marketing must speak the language of business contribution.

When asked how he would reimagine the measurement space, Irish didn’t suggest new tools, he suggested new priorities. In too many organizations, measurement is treated as something to be dealt with after launch. But that sequencing breaks the feedback loop and undermines the ability to optimize.

His advice was clear: build measurement into campaign planning from the beginning. Know what KPIs matter. Know how results will be tracked. And make sure insights are available fast enough to change direction, not just report on history.

Because without that foundation, everything else from media spend to creative iteration is a guess.

Independently Created. Not affiliated with POSSIBLE.

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