Build a Real-Time Engine to Drive Marketing Performance.
The Pressure to Perform in a Fragmented Market
Marketers have entered a year where speed, integration, and adaptability are more valuable than scale alone. The modern media landscape is fragmented across streaming platforms, CTV, social, mobile, in-store activations, and retail media networks. According to InMarket’s 2025 Digital Marketing Playbook (December 2024), this fragmentation has created an environment where traditional linear planning models are no longer capable of meeting performance demands.
Consumers are agile: they shift from a shoppable Pinterest search to a TikTok feed, to streaming CTV, to a mobile push notification, all in the same hour. Yet most brands still build strategies around channels, not journeys. The gap between consumer velocity and marketing response time is now one of the biggest performance leaks in the industry.
Marketers must treat marketing as a live system, not a campaign calendar. That means unifying data sources, orchestrating funnel activity across channels, optimizing in real time, and anchoring every decision in measurable outcomes. This is not a marginal upgrade. It’s the architecture of modern performance.
Optimization: The New Default
For decades, marketers accepted inefficiency as an unavoidable tax. Budgets were locked early, optimization happened weeks after campaigns launched, and performance lagged behind opportunity. That reality has changed.
A joint study between InMarket and the CMO Council, Getting Smart About Ad Waste (June 2023), found that always-on inflight optimization can eliminate wasted media by up to 11x. This figure is not theoretical. It reflects the difference between static planning and real-time reallocation of spend as signals shift.
One travel brand featured in the report serves as a blueprint:
It integrated CTV, mobile, and search data streams into a unified performance layer.
When mid-flight signals flagged underperformance on a segment of CTV inventory, spend was automatically redirected toward mobile audiences showing higher visitation and intent behaviors.
Within the same campaign window and without incremental spend, ROI increased by 42%.
The implication is clear: optimization isn’t a nice-to-have tactic, it’s the operational baseline of 2025 performance. Marketers who continue optimizing quarterly will lose to those optimizing hourly.
Funnel Orchestration, Not Fragmentation
Many marketers still run disconnected top- and bottom-of-funnel campaigns, measuring awareness and conversion as separate streams. This approach leaves massive performance on the table.
The Playbook’s data is unequivocal. Campaigns that orchestrate top- and bottom-of-funnel activities deliver a 15% higher click-through rate than campaigns run in isolation. A key chart in the report (page 5) shows how Moments CTR increases from approximately 3.4% to 3.9% when preceptivity and audience data are layered on top of moments-based campaigns. That 0.5 point gain may look modest, but in high-volume campaigns, it translates into millions of incremental clicks and conversions.
The logic is simple but powerful: when you feed upper-funnel signals directly into lower-funnel decisioning, the system compounds rather than duplicates.
A consumer packaged goods brand demonstrated this effect by linking influencer-driven brand awareness to hyper-local conversion campaigns. Rather than treating these as separate tactics, they ran them as one connected engine, with signal loops between the two. The outcome:
19% lift in conversion rates,
Zero increase in budget,
Measurably shorter path to purchase.
Funnel orchestration eliminates one of marketing’s most costly inefficiencies: paying twice for the same customer journey.
Social Amplification with Creator Authenticity
InMarket’s Playbook makes clear that social media has matured from an attention channel into a full-scale commerce ecosystem. Global users spend 2 hours and 30 minutes per day on social and messaging platforms (eMarketer, H1 2024). TikTok, Instagram, Facebook, X, Reddit, Snap, and Pinterest have become critical conversion gateways, not just awareness drivers.
The performance opportunity is especially clear with creator partnerships. Audiences increasingly filter brand messages through trusted human voices. The key, the report notes, is authentic alignment between brand identity and creator output. Consumers can identify when messaging is out of sync with a brand’s DNA, and they penalize it.
Pinterest data highlighted in the report shows that the top reason Gen Z uses the platform is to find information about products or brands. This is intent behavior, not passive scrolling. Creator-led content doesn’t just build awareness; it creates low-friction entry points to conversion when integrated into the broader performance system.
A retailer who used paid creator partnerships alongside its precision media buying saw measurable lift in cost-per-acquisition efficiency, 14% lower CPA over a 6-week period, driven by stronger engagement signals feeding directly into retargeting pools.
Creators are not an afterthought, they are an accelerant.
AI: A Force Multiplier
Even the most advanced manual media teams can’t match the complexity and speed required in a real-time environment. That’s why AI has moved from experimental hype to strategic infrastructure.
InMarket’s survey within the Playbook found more than half of marketers are actively in the “test and learn” phase of integrating AI tools across audience targeting, creative production, and optimization workflows. AI turns fragmented signals into structured intelligence, enabling instant reallocation, content variation, and targeting refinement.
The Heinz “Ketchup” campaign illustrates this power. By using AI to generate creative concepts and adapt messaging dynamically, Heinz was able to produce and test high-volume, high-relevance creative in near real time. That speed collapsed what used to be a weeks-long process into days, giving their media spend the ability to follow culture as it happens, not after.
This is the real function of AI in marketing: not gimmicks, not one-off tools, but a force multiplier for human strategy.
Measurement:The Operating Spine
A real-time performance engine doesn’t work without a measurement layer built for velocity. InMarket is explicit: “Holistic measurement is a non-negotiable.”
The strongest systems combine Media Mix Modeling (MMM) with Multi-Touch Attribution (MTA). MMM informs strategic allocation across channels, what the mix should look like. MTA closes the loop by showing which tactics are actually driving outcomes in real time. Together, they form a closed feedback system that can adjust budgets while campaigns are live, not months later.
Without this layer, unification collapses into reporting. With it, marketing becomes a responsive operating system.
CEO-Level Imperatives
Treat optimization as infrastructure, not enhancement. Real-time reallocation isn’t optional.
Collapse the funnel. Awareness and conversion should work off the same signal, not separate P&Ls.
Creators are performance assets. Build them into the operating stack, not the PR calendar.
Make AI your multiplier. Manual optimization is too slow for modern velocity.
Lock the loop with MMM + MTA. Real-time measurement is the spine of performance.
Bottom Line Real-time Marketing Engines don’t Predict Outcomes, they Control them.
In 2025, performance isn’t determined by who spends more. It’s determined by who moves faster and smarter. The brands that build unified signal systems, orchestrate funnels, activate creator momentum, deploy AI at the core, and lock everything to a live measurement loop will operate with strategic control others can’t match.
This is the blueprint for a performance engine: optimization as default, orchestration as structure, AI as velocity, creators as accelerants, and measurement as spine. The rest is noise.
