Advertising has always been an industry that loves its own lies. We tell ourselves that clicks are insight, dashboards equal truth, and engagement is a KPI instead of just a polite way of saying someone accidentally tapped your banner while trying to close Candy Crush.

We’ve built a multi-billion-dollar religion around vanity metrics, then wondered why the congregation keeps leaving mid-sermon.

Clicks are cheap dopamine.

Impressions are the air guitar of metrics—flashy, but producing no actual sound.

And half the dashboards CMOs cling to are basically TikTok filters with bar charts: they look slick, they make you feel like something important is happening, but at the end of the day you’re just staring at your own face in augmented reality.

Into this circus wanders Anders Lithner, CEO of Brand Metrics—a Swedish data guy who’s either crazy brave or just Scandinavian enough to say the quiet parts out loud. As he told me, “We are a little afraid of the actual truth. But it’s not because we don’t understand it. I think most people here understand how advertising works.”

Translation: marketers don’t actually want the truth, because the truth might just get them fired.

Anders didn’t stumble into this from theory. He started Brand Metrics when publishers came to him frustrated with digital reporting. “We had publishing customers, media owners…they came to us and said, we really have nothing to show except the click data as to whether it’s working or not. Can you help us?” The first two clients in Sweden validated the idea. Then came the Guardian and the Financial Times. Anders recalled: “Our third customer was the Guardian. Our fourth customer was the Financial Times. Then we kind of knew, okay, this thing’s got legs.”

It worked because he wasn’t selling dashboards—he was selling proof. As he told publishers: “You could never win at getting maximum number of impressions for the lowest price. But you can win at influencing people. So we came to them and said, here’s a way to demonstrate that you’re influencing the audience.”

That’s a pitch with sharp teeth.

Here’s what Anders has been saying—things the industry pretends not to hear:

None of this should be shocking. Yet it is. Because the industry is addicted to easy wins. CFOs want neat weekly reports. CEOs want to believe they can “buy intent.” Media buyers optimize toward whatever fits cleanly on a PowerPoint slide—even when, as Anders put it bluntly, “If you’re optimizing a campaign for the highest click rate, you’d literally be doing the opposite of what would be beneficial from a business perspective.”

Anders is essentially saying: stop pretending this is mind control. It’s influence, not magic. Heinz isn’t in your fridge because of a one-time banner—it’s there because you’ve been influenced for years to believe Heinz equals ketchup. Whirlpool doesn’t win because of last-click attribution—it wins because, as Anders noted, “Most people buy two fridges in their lives, but Whirlpool is making money off occupying that space in your mind.”

And this is where Anders becomes dangerous. He’s not just dismantling bad metrics; he’s dismantling the safety net. If you can’t hide behind clicks, if you can’t inflate your dashboard with impressions, then suddenly you’re accountable to real outcomes: brand lift, preference, purchase intent.

And that’s terrifying—because it leaves nowhere to hide. But it’s also necessary. Because here’s the dirty secret: we already know this. Anders isn’t telling us something brand-new. He’s forcing us to admit it.

So yes, he’s Swedish, slightly dangerous with data, and a guy who might ruin your next QBR by asking: “Did this actually change anything in people’s minds?” But he’s also right.

And the industry’s refusal to grapple with that truth is why we’re still drowning in meaningless metrics.

Now, here’s the part where I pull back the curtain: this intro? It’s just the appetizer. The real meal—the deep-dives, the data, the industry autopsies that make PR teams sweat—is always in ADOTAT+. That’s where we dig into attention as currency, the economics of frequency, why perception will always precede behavior, and why the future of brand measurement isn’t a report but a predictive engine.

Because let’s face it: free columns are for the lies we tell ourselves. ADOTAT+ is where we deal with the truth.

If Part 1 was the sledgehammer, Part 2 is the blueprint. Let’s get analytical. Anders Lytner didn’t just dunk on clicks for sport—he laid out a framework that slices through the noise of adtech’s bad habits. Here’s the breakdown:

Optimizing for CTR is optimizing for stupidity. A click doesn’t equal intent—it equals curiosity, confusion, or in many cases, fat thumbs. If you chase clicks, you’re not building brand equity; you’re building a traffic jam of meaningless engagement. The campaigns that live and die by CTR are the ones CFOs cut first when budgets tighten.

This is one of the industry’s dirtiest sleights of hand. Viewability asks: could the ad be seen? Attention asks: was it? One is about pixels on a screen, the other is about neurons firing in a human brain. Treating them as interchangeable is like saying that standing outside a stadium is the same as watching the game. Without outcomes attached, attention is a half-finished sentence.

Performance marketing whispers: “Immediate results or it didn’t happen.” But Anders’ framework insists: real money is made in perception, not in the last click. Whirlpool doesn’t dominate because of bottom-funnel tricks; it dominates because when a fridge dies, people don’t comparison-shop—they already trust Whirlpool. Perception precedes behavior, always. This isn’t philosophy; it’s the operating system of consumer choice.

Everyone loves to complain about ad fatigue, but Anders’ data points to a bigger sin: too little frequency is killing campaigns faster than too much. Showing someone one banner once and asking if it “moved the needle” is the marketing equivalent of handing someone one Dorito and asking if they’re full. Without repeated exposure, there is no cognitive lift, no memory encoding, no outcome. Frequency, done right, is a multiplier—not a nuisance.

Legacy measurement relies on panels, which Anders politely dismantles as fine but flawed. Panels are slow, small, and skewed. Brand Metrics scales because it measures real people in the wild, across markets, at speed. The advantage isn’t just data collection—it’s comparability. A panel might tell you uplift was “5,” but Anders’ approach tells you: uplift was “5, and that’s above industry expectation.” That shift—from numbers in isolation to numbers in context—is what makes his framework dangerous to the status quo.