The Media & Measurement Leadership Council

The ANA’s Media & Measurement Leadership Council (MMLC) is an activist group of brand advertisers’ chief media and research officers, who are ultimately responsible for the effective deployment of media expenditures, as well as the measurement and analytics to support those investments.

The MMLC is grounded in the advancement of outcomes — bringing together the collective voice, muscle, and will of the advertiser’s media and measurement communities to address industry barriers and shared issues that inhibit business and brand growth.

The mission of the MMLC is to set the industry media agenda by identifying and solving pressing and important initiatives that unlock increased value for advertisers to accelerate business and brand growth. Through our agenda and collective actions, we will add billions of dollars in media effectiveness to our industry that will greatly influence all sides of the system, from agency to publisher to brand marketers.

Challenges to be Solved

The list of media and measurement issues continues to evolve: transparency, ad fraud, brand safety, lack of cross media measurement, investment in diverse media, and others. This must change and will only change if advertisers, as those who fund and drive the ecosystem, organize to take control of industry issues, and shape them to their benefit. Otherwise, those massive investments are fraught with waste. The MMLC will help increase savings through the reduction of waste in paid media spend, driving growth and business value, solving disruptions, leveling the playing field with the sell side, and ensuring the advertiser agenda leads media and measurement.

• Chair: Shenan Reed, Global Chief Media Officer, General Motors
• MMLC Lead: Jason Trubowitz, SVP Media & Measurement

Interested in Joining the MMLC?

If your brand is an ANA member and interested in joining the Media & Measurement Leadership Council (MMLC), we welcome your participation. Membership is open to the senior-most leader/department head responsible for media planning and/or media measurement within your organization. To learn more or get involved, please contact Jason Trubowitz, SVP Media & Measurement at jtrubowitz@ana.net.

Current Participating Brands:

Current Areas of Focus

Through working groups and industry collaboration, the MMLC is actively addressing the following topics:

Retail Media

The Issue: Retail Media Networks (RMNs) often provide limited visibility into performance data, making it difficult for marketers to compare results across platforms or fully optimize spend. Internally, many companies lack clear ownership or defined funding structures for retail media, which creates silos and slows decision-making.

Our Work: In collaboration with the MRC, the Retail Media Working Group is defining common practices and standards for measurement to help marketers evaluate RMNs more consistently. This effort is reinforced by insights from the 2024 ANA’s “Retail Media Networks: Optimism Tempered with Caution” report, which emphasizes that RMNs continue to face significant measurement challenges, making better evaluation practices a clear priority. At the same time, the group is developing internal guidance to support brands in clarifying roles, aligning teams, and streamlining budget strategies, all with the goal of making retail media easier to manage, measure, and scale within the broader media ecosystem.

CTV/Streaming

The Issue: A lack of consistent methodologies and transparency across CTV platforms prevents advertisers from measuring campaign effectiveness.

Our Work: The CTV Working Group is addressing the key challenges in CTV measurement and is helping to develop a set of ‘CTV Principles’ for platforms, publishers, and buyers to follow. The goal is to deliver a marketer-led call to action that pushes for greater transparency in CTV buying and measurement practices. Advertisers need clear visibility into how their campaigns are delivered, targeted, and evaluated, including what data is being used, how it’s modeled, and how performance is measured.

Media Sustainability

The Issue: As media consumption grows, so does its environmental impact. Digital advertising generates significant carbon emissions, yet most marketers lack visibility into the environmental impact of their media activity, particularly within emerging and high-growth channels like programmatic and CTV, among others to be explored.

Our Work: Following the release of our 2024 report “Sustainability in Media Planning: How Brands Can Start Reducing Carbon Emissions in Advertising” (focused on programmatic and developed in partnership with Scope3), the MMLC will be launching a second phase of this initiative in 2025 focused on CTV. This new study will measure the carbon impact of participating brands’ CTV campaigns, with the goal of identifying which media activities are driving the greatest reductions in emissions. The goal is to highlight actionable best practices for reducing carbon output in CTV media planning and activation.

Media Transparency

The Issue: Media transparency remains a major challenge, with hidden fees, limited data access, and low-quality inventory making it difficult for marketers to track spend or optimize performance, especially in programmatic and CTV.

Our Work: Efforts are being made to create more consistent standards for how media is measured, valued, and reported. This includes pushing for greater access to data, clearer definitions of quality, and stronger alignment across platforms and partners. The goal is to give marketers the visibility they need to make smarter decisions, reduce waste, and ensure their investments are delivering real value.

Central to this is improving supply chain visibility, a challenge described in the 2023 “ANA Programmatic Media Supply Chain Transparency Study” which showed how lack of transparency and data irregularities can disadvantage inclusive suppliers and compromise media quality.

The Programmatic Transparency Benchmark Findings, most recently from May 2025, further show meaningful progress: gains in true ad spend efficiency, reduced MFA exposure, and expanded access to log-level data. These improvements represent important progress toward greater transparency across the programmatic supply chain, a key stepping stone to more accountable media buying.

Complementing these efforts, “The Acceleration of Principal Media” report (2024) emphasizes the growing need for marketers to be provided with clear guidelines around agency/client contracts, approval processes, and media auditing, all critical tools for maintaining transparency and control in an evolving media landscape.

Programmatic Media Buying: Inclusive Suppliers

The Issue: While inclusive-owned suppliers can help brands reach underserved audiences and encourage growth, systemic barriers (such as algorithmic bias, outdated brand safety practices, and verification challenges) continue to limit access to programmatic investment.

Our Work: In partnership with the 4As, the ANA convened the Inclusive Programmatic Supplier Task Force to help marketers expand investment in inclusive suppliers across the programmatic ecosystem. This initiative is working to reduce barriers limiting access to inclusive-owned media, address brand safety misclassification and AI bias, and provide practical recommendations to build better performance-driven media plans. While certification can open up new revenue opportunities for inclusive publishers, the process can be challenging, especially when layered on top of these systemic inefficiencies. To help reduce these barriers, the Task Force is working to support publishers through the certification process and create a clearer, more accessible pathway to programmatic investment.

Influencer Marketing

The Issue: Influencer marketing continues to grow, but it often suffers from waste and inefficiencies. This may include lack of proper vetting, inflated engagement metrics, bot-driven traffic, or limited visibility into actual media value and ROI, as well as a lack of standardized measurement.

Our Work: Focusing on identifying waste in influencer media spend and develop clear frameworks for planning, buying, and measurement.

Long Term Strategic Ambitions

The MMLC aims to transform the media ecosystem by recommending solutions that deliver value for advertisers. This includes cutting waste, improving how media is measured and bought, and pushing for more transparency, inclusion, and sustainability. The goal is to provide marketers with the tools and standards they need to make smarter media decisions and drive more value from their media investments. By working together, we’re helping shape a media ecosystem that’s more effective and built for long-term growth.

Thought Leadership

• Connected TV: Unlocking Sustainable Growth Through Smarter Media Planning (October 2025)
  This report, released in partnership with Scope3 and ANA member brands including Chipotle, GM, Honda, HP, Mastercard, and Prudential, explores how advertisers can incorporate sustainable practices into CTV buying without sacrificing performance. By applying smarter planning and optimization strategies, brands can cut carbon emissions, reduce media waste, and improve efficiency.
• Retail Media Internal Management Guidance (September 2025)
  This guidance was developed in collaboration with several Retail Media Working Group member brands to address internal Retail Media challenges and share action steps to strengthen in-house operations and improve cross-functional alignment.
• Programmatic Transparency Benchmark Findings (May 2025)
  This was launched as a continuation of the work and recommendations from the December 2023 report and now includes CTV, offering a more comprehensive view of the programmatic media landscape.
• Sustainability in Media Planning: How Brands Can Start Reducing Carbon Emissions in Advertising (September 2024)
  In this groundbreaking study, the ANA worked with Scope3 and major brands from the Media & Measurement Leadership Council, including Coca-Cola, GM, Kimberly Clark, Kroger, Mars, and Mondelez to determine the immediate opportunities to reduce their carbon emissions.
• Retail Media Networks: Optimism Tempered with Caution (July 2024)
  While retail media networks (RMNs) have been around for well over a decade, they have really come into their own over the past few years. This ANA report concludes that, “Retail media networks have a measurement issue...and therefore better measurement of RMNs is clearly required.”
• The Acceleration of Principal Media (May 2024)
  Principal media has been getting increased attention, and marketers need to be aware and knowledgeable. This report provides detailed guidelines around areas including the importance of the client/agency contract, the approval process, and auditing.
• ANA Programmatic Media Supply Chain Transparency Study: Complete Report (December 2023)
  The ANA teamed with risk advisory firm Kroll to field a study with the goal of illuminating, clarifying, and demystifying the U.S-based programmatic supply chain.
• Guidelines for Getting Started When Investing with Diverse Media Companies (September 2023)
  The ANA and the 4A’s partnered on a new set of guidelines designed to help companies increase their investments in diverse media companies. The guidelines are intended to help those marketers who are interested in supporting diverse suppliers but are still sitting on the sidelines and not sure where to begin.