Outcomes: The industry’s current favourite word is also its biggest positioning mistake
Opinion
There is a significant difference between ‘outcomes’ as an industry standard and ‘outcomes’ as a positioning strategy. The industry is confusing the two at scale, writes Paul Evans.
The outcomes era has been declared. Across ad tech and media, a growing number of businesses have decided that “outcomes” is not just a direction of travel. It is what makes them worth choosing by customers.
That is a serious mistake, and it is accelerating.
At Cannes last year, tvScientific launched Guaranteed Outcomes. The name says it all: you only pay when the results check out. Innovid has gone further with an Outcomes Suite that links what someone watched to what they subsequently bought, across every screen.
Viant Technology launched a product in January called Outcomes: a fully autonomous ad product in which advertisers specify the result they want, and AI handles execution. And WPP has just been hired by Jaguar Land Rover, with a core component of the client/agency relationship focused on outcome-based remuneration.
LiveRamp’s CEO Scott Howe recently told investors the industry was now in what he called the Outcomes Era. He was right about the talk. He just didn’t address what happens when everyone joins the same conversation at once.
When a word belongs to everyone, it belongs to no one
I am not arguing against outcomes. As a former advertiser, I embedded outcomes as expectations in every brief I wrote – this structural shift towards genuine accountability is long overdue. But there is a significant difference between ‘outcomes’ as an industry standard and ‘outcomes’ as a positioning strategy. The industry is confusing the two at scale.
Positioning is the strategic context with which a business is considered and chosen by customers. It is built on what makes you different, the specific problem you solve in a way nobody else does.
When every major player converges on identical language, that language stops functioning as a differentiator and becomes wallpaper. The more companies that claim outcomes, the less the word means, until it communicates nothing except membership of the same club. Which, from a customer’s perspective, is useless.
Viant delivers outcomes. tvScientific guarantees them. WPP now gets paid against them. And dozens of others carry the word across every surface of their go-to-market messaging. A customer evaluating partners sees the same promise reflected back from every direction. No one is different.
The floor is not the ceiling
The deeper problem is what “outcomes” actually represents as a statement of value. Every business ultimately delivers value in one of two ways: it saves a customer money, or it helps a customer make money. That is the foundational logic of commerce – the minimum expectation of any commercial relationship.
Metrics like clicks and impressions were always proxies for something assumed to exist: a business outcome. Declaring that you deliver outcomes is not a new idea. It is a more honest restatement of what advertising was always supposed to do.
That is a hygiene condition, not strategy or valuable as positioning. The moment a company positions primarily on outcomes, it is saying: we do what advertising is supposed to do. That is categorically not a reason to be chosen.
The transparency problem hiding inside the promise
Then, as a final issue to contend with, we have the truth. Positioning cannot be fabricated or claimed – It must be rooted in the real product or service capability.
Some of the companies racing to claim outcomes are doing so while preserving the behaviours that make genuine measurement impossible: opaque operations, obfuscated practices, or a current industry favourite – principal media models – where the agency sets the wholesale price of the inventory it then sells on, and self-reports results that nobody outside the organisation can verify.
Outcomes without transparency are not outcomes. They are a story. You cannot prove impact without knowing where every pound went and who had a commercial interest in how the results were reported.
When the financial flows are unauditable by design, the number at the end is simply a figure produced by the same system that benefits from it looking good. Any good customer will seek this verification. Any good competitor will seek to undermine your positioning through the buying process.
This is not a theoretical concern. ISBA’s programmatic transparency audits have spent years trying to illuminate a supply chain that the industry has deliberately made difficult to examine. But the real story wasn’t the percentage. It was how long the audit took, and how many parts of the market simply refused to participate. The enthusiasm for outcomes doesn’t always extend to the bit where someone else checks the figures.
It’s a hard position to hold. Selling accountability to clients while making sure they can’t actually check the numbers. If your GTM message is outcomes but your operating model depends on nobody looking too closely, you don’t just have a positioning problem. It is a contradiction. When the industry closes that gap, the companies that shouted loudest about accountability may have the furthest to fall.
The right answer is one floor up
The businesses that will build durable competitive advantage are the ones that understand the difference between what they deliver and how they deliver it. Outcomes are the destination. They are not the value that makes a business stand out and be chosen.
A customer does not shortlist a partner because that partner promised results. They shortlist a partner that can explain why its particular capability or method gets you there in a way nobody else can. The outcome is the evidence of a well-constructed proposition.
The correct question is not whether you deliver outcomes. Every supplier will say yes. The real question is what makes your route to that outcome different from anyone else’s. That answer is positioning.
The outcomes era is real, and the accountability it demands is necessary. But a word that every company uses to explain why they should be chosen becomes, by definition, the reason none of them will be.
Paul Evans is the founder and chief positioning engineer at V2RSION