There Are Two ‘Outcome’ Economies Right Now. But Only One of Them Stops You Wasting Money.

Everyone in this industry has discovered the word ‘outcome’. Us included.

And, for good reason - it's the right word. The problem is that at least two very different things are being sold under it right now, and if you can't tell them apart, you're going to buy the wrong one.

Here's the current split:

Outcome Type 1: Attribution Outcomes

This is the newer, louder version. It says: connect media exposure to a real-world action - a purchase, a sign-up, a store visit - using transaction data, telco signals, or a data clean room. 

Pay on a CPA basis and get a shiny dashboard that says ‘this campaign drove this sale’. 

In essence, it measures what happened after you already bought the media. It tells you whether a spend produced a result. And that data is super valuable. What it doesn’t disclose is whether the spend itself was any good in the first place.

The scary reality with models such as this is that you can attribute a sale to an impression that ran on a made-for-advertising site, next to pretty rubbish content, served to a bot-adjacent audience, at 2 am, at a price 40% above market. The attribution layer will still report a conversion if a purchase happens to correlate. It just can't tell you that you paid four times what the impression was worth to get there, or that 60% of your budget never had a chance to convert at all because it was burned on inventory no human being ever actually saw.

See, attribution outcomes are a smoke detector. Extremely useful. Necessary, even. But a smoke detector doesn't stop the fire; it just tells you, with increasing precision, that your house is burning down.

Outcome Type 2: Curation Outcomes

The other definition works upstream. It says: fix what you're buying before you measure what it produced. Strip MFA inventory out of the supply path. Apply contextual and quality filters at the bid level. Consolidate fragmented, overlapping supply paths so you're not paying five different SSPs a fee to fight over the same impression. And build the media plan around inventory quality and efficient supply chain economics, not just downstream signal.

See this model as fireproofing the building. It's less exciting to talk about (there's no consumer transaction graph, no Mastercard logo, no "3 billion cards" stat to put on a slide) but it's the layer that actually removes waste rather than reporting on it more accurately.

And the numbers back it up: we've seen 63–81% cost efficiency versus the open market, up to 3x CTR, and 20 - 40% higher VCR, not because we measured harder, but because we bought better. Attribution can't manufacture that efficiency after the fact. It can only tell you, expensively and precisely, that you didn't have it.

Why This Distinction Actually Matters to Your Budget

The thing is, people are talking about these two models almost identically right now: ‘outcomes, not proxies,’ ‘real results, not impressions’. Hands up - we’re guilty as charged too. 

What we need to try and resolve is how we sell two products that solve completely different problems without falling into the trap of using the same language. It’s hard, right?

The crux of it is: If your media budget is bleeding into MFA inventory, opaque fee stacks, and redundant supply paths, no amount of better attribution downstream fixes that. You'll just get a very precise, very confident readout of exactly how much you wasted. Packaged as a win because something converted. 

Ask any vendor pitching you outcomes one direct question: does this stop me buying bad media, or does it just tell me more accurately that I did?

If the answer is the second one, you haven't bought outcomes. You've bought a more expensive receipt.