What Judging the 2026 YouTube NZ Marketing Awards Taught Me About the Measurement Problem in NZ Marketing
I recently spent time in Auckland as part of the judging panel for the YouTube NZ Marketing Awards – now in their 35th year and the only awards programme in New Zealand focused specifically on the business disciplines and commercial benefits of great marketing. Thanks to the NZ Marketing and Marketing Association team for running a tight, well-organised process – and for the food that kept energy up across what were, at times, some genuinely robust discussions around the table.
The experience gave me something I hadn’t quite expected: an unusually clear window into how some of New Zealand’s most active marketing organisations are thinking, building strategy, and reporting results. With 96 brands represented as finalists across more than 30 categories, it was a rare opportunity to see behind the curtain of the country’s best marketing work. That alone was worth the trip.
But the two days also crystallised something I think about a lot in my own consulting work – and it’s worth putting on the table.
The measurement gap is real, and it showed up consistently
The awards define marketing excellence clearly: effective marketing strategy that has led to measurable results for a business or brand. That’s the standard. Applying it in practice is where things get interesting.
The entries that generated the most discussion weren’t the weak ones. They were the ones where the underlying work was clearly strong – smart strategy, genuine creative effort, real audience engagement – but where the results couldn’t carry the weight placed on them. Not because the results weren’t there, but because they weren’t communicated in a way a cold reader could assess with confidence.
Brand awareness figures presented without a baseline. Sales numbers cited without percentage movement or a comparison period. Equity scores tracked without context for what they were tracking against. These aren’t small omissions – they’re the difference between a result that lands and one that leaves a judge uncertain.
WARC’s Future of Measurement research identifies this tension directly: most advertising models only measure impact over a relatively short window, while the real commercial effect – on pricing power, brand equity, and long-term customer behaviour – takes considerably longer to materialise. That makes measurement genuinely hard. But it also makes the discipline of clear, contextualised reporting more important, not less.
The commercial link was the most common missing piece
Across the entries that prompted the longest conversations, the most consistent gap was a clear, explicit connection between the marketing activity and business objectives. Not the marketing objectives – the business objectives.
There’s an important distinction here. Brand awareness is a marketing metric. Market share movement, revenue contribution, customer acquisition cost, pricing resilience – these are business metrics. The entries that argued most compellingly for excellence were those that traced a clear line from strategy to execution to commercial outcome, with enough specificity that a judge – or a CFO – could follow it.
This matters beyond the awards context. NZ Marketing has written about the ongoing challenge of proving brand equity’s commercial contribution, and the difficulty is real. But the answer isn’t to stop trying to make that link – it’s to build the measurement framework before the campaign starts, not after, so the data exists to tell the story properly when you need to.
Self-assessed metrics need context to land
Several entries leaned on earned media value, social sentiment scores, or share of voice figures as primary evidence of impact. These aren’t illegitimate tools – earned media in particular is gaining commercial significance as AI-driven search draws increasingly from third-party coverage, making credible external presence a genuine business asset rather than just a PR metric.
But earned media value is largely self-reported, and the methodologies behind it vary considerably between agencies and platforms. When it appears as the headline result without supporting commercial data, it asks a judge to place a lot of trust in a figure they can’t independently verify. The entries that used these metrics well positioned them as supporting evidence alongside harder commercial data – not as the primary case.
What this brings back to client work
Sitting with two days of entries sharpened something I already believed but now hold with more conviction: the measurement conversation needs to happen at the start of a project, not the end.
The question “how will we know this worked?” – answered in commercial terms, with baselines established and success metrics agreed before the campaign launches – changes the quality of everything that follows. It changes how strategy gets written, how creative gets briefed, and how results get reported. It also means that when the work is done, you have something to show for it that holds up under scrutiny.
The winners we assessed over those two days had done that work. Their submissions made a clear, complete case – strategy to execution to outcome – in language that translated marketing activity into business results. That’s what earned them their place on the finalists list, and ultimately their shot at the awards night on 2 September.
With a record number of entries across more than 30 categories this year, making the finalists list is a genuine achievement. The standard was high, and the breadth of work across Aotearoa’s marketing community was impressive.