Adam Vickers doesn’t need a hype reel to explain what brands are thinking about right now. As Head of Account Management for RTB House in the UK, he’s speaking daily with retail, fashion, and travel companies trying to make sense of a changing media environment and figure out whether their investment is actually working.

At MADFest London, he shared a consistent theme: marketers aren’t just looking for new media formats or targeting tools. They’re looking for measurement they can trust.

“Ever since GA4 came in, we’ve seen more and more of our clients looking for alternative measurement partners and platforms,” Vickers said. While performance marketing still dominates day-to-day operations, he pointed to a growing discomfort with the default metrics provided by platforms. “It is a challenge for all our brands,” he added. “We find that across the board.”

RTB House itself has been broadening its offering in response to how brands now plan and evaluate campaigns. Known for its strength in programmatic display and retargeting, the company has moved deeper into full-funnel capabilities, including Connected TV (CTV) and more nuanced contextual targeting. One product in focus at MADFest was IntentGPT, a solution built to identify and reach audiences based on real-time intent signals, rather than just behavioral history.

But building smarter media tools isn’t enough if clients can’t measure what that activity is doing.

Vickers was quick to clarify that RTB House doesn’t lock clients into a fixed measurement setup. “We tend to be able to work with all different types of partners in our space,” he said. That includes analytics platforms, incrementality providers, and media mix modeling specialists, depending on the maturity, goals, and internal structure of each brand.

One partner Vickers called out directly was Fospha. “We are really enjoying the fruitful relationship that we are building with Fospha at the moment,” he said. “They seem to be thriving in the measurement space right now.”

That relationship was front and center at a recent RTB House event called RTB Day, where Fospha joined as a featured speaker. For Vickers, one stat from their presentation left a lasting impression:

“That was a pretty cool stat,” he noted. “It stuck with a lot of us.”

The number resonated because it puts numbers to something many brand and performance marketers intuitively believe but struggle to quantify. When platforms report success mostly through last-click attribution, it's difficult to connect investment in demand-generation channels, like video, creators, or CTV, to business outcomes further down the funnel.

“That’s where Fospha in particular, but also the shift in thinking more broadly, is really helping,” Vickers said. “It’s beneficial to our clients, and to us.”

Measurement complexity isn’t just a technical challenge, it’s a budget one. Especially as economic pressure continues, proving the impact of top-of-funnel spend is becoming critical to defend brand campaigns and justify continued investment across teams.

Vickers sees this not just from the CMO level, but from operational teams too. “It’s not just about ROAS anymore,” he said. “It’s about understanding what’s contributing to long-term value.”

That’s led many brands to seek out measurement partners that offer more than just dashboards. What matters is actionability, insight that can feed into decisions about where to allocate budget, which channels to scale, and how to maintain momentum beyond short-term conversions.

From RTB House’s perspective, that’s where the Fospha collaboration adds value. “We’re starting to build that shared understanding with clients, what’s working and why,” Vickers said.

RTB House’s own evolution into new formats, more context-aware tools, and multi-touch funnel support reflects a larger truth in the industry: the lines between brand and performance are blurring. Media buying has become more complex. So has proving what works.

What hasn’t changed, according to Vickers, is the need for simplicity on the brand side. Marketers aren’t looking for one more black box. They want transparency, reliability, and the ability to communicate impact internally, whether that’s to finance teams, executive leadership, or board-level stakeholders.

Fospha is the leading full-funnel measurement platform helping the fastest-growing retail brands close the gap between upper-funnel inspiration and real commercial outcomes, even on third-party platforms.

With Fospha’s privacy-safe full-funnel measurement model, brands can:

Whether you're launching a creator-led campaign or scaling spend across marketplaces, Fospha helps you measure what matters and prove it with confidence.

📥 Want the data behind it all?
Download Glow, Fospha’s latest research report, featuring insights from brands like Sweaty Betty and Lounge Underwear:
👉 fospha.com/glow

That’s your 24-hour head start.

Keep this guide handy, make your picks, and book your meetings early — the most valuable conversations won’t wait. See you in Shoreditch.

— The Unofficially MAD//Fest Team