Media agency life can feel like a constant balancing act. You’re under pressure to deliver performance, justify spend, meet privacy regulations, and tie every impression to a business outcome, all while platforms shift, clients demand more, and budgets stay flat.
That’s exactly why Blis brought together leaders from Mastercard and Circana for a panel discussion at Future-Proofed: Sydney, to help agency teams turn pressure into progress through data-driven insights and strategic collaboration.
This panel wasn’t just a one-off event, it reflects a deeper partnership.
By joining forces with industry leaders like Mastercard and Circana, Blis is solving the biggest media challenges with smarter targeting, richer insights, and more measurable outcomes.
With Mastercard, we’ve created a geo-powered, AI-driven solution that uses aggregated and anonymised spend insights to reach highly engaged consumers and measure sales uplift and business drivers so brands can see the real impact of their media dollars.
With Circana, we pair postcode-level retail and category insights with our geo-powered activation so advertisers can focus on media where it will have the most impact.
Together, these partnerships make campaigns more accountable, media smarter, and strategy more precise, helping you plan with better insights, buy with greater precision, and measure what truly matters.
Here are five challenges you probably know all too well, and how Blis, in partnership with Mastercard and Circana, is helping to solve them.
1. You’ve got clicks, but no business outcomes
At one point during the panel, Justin Keh, Director, Channel Sales and Partnerships APAC at Mastercard, cut straight to the core of agency frustration:
“Clicks, impressions… they’re not enough anymore. CMOs are asking about business outcomes. What is my incremental sales lift?”
You could feel the nods around the room.
Justin explained that Mastercard’s role isn’t just about adding more data to dashboards. It’s about helping brands understand why something worked and what audiences are best to target.
“We believe that when advertising insights are grounded in actual spend behaviour, campaigns will deliver better results. Through our solutions, we’re not only measuring business outcomes and sales uplift, but we are also uncovering the key drivers behind the results. Which consumer segments responded best? What time of day or day of week drove the most engagement? These are the insights that help you optimise with precision”.
With Blis handling targeting using location and behavioural signals to reach people in the right context, and Mastercard closing the loop with outcome data, you finally get a straight line between strategy, spend and sales. No more end of campaign guesswork. No more inflated metrics that don’t mean anything to your client.
2. You’re running full funnel campaigns, but the top and bottom don’t talk to each other
There’s a disconnect in omnichannel planning that still hasn’t been solved for many teams. Awareness is driven in one place. Conversion tracked in another. The result is a stitched together story that doesn’t hold up under scrutiny.
Elias Psarologos, Regional Director ANZ at Blis, pointed to this exact gap and how location data is helping to close it.
“It’s very important for us from an activation perspective and a pivot from being a location company to an audience business. We use real world behaviour.”
He explained that campaigns shouldn’t just follow devices. They should follow your consumers daily life.
“Now, we can activate audiences where they are, on their commute, at work, on the way home, all across mobile, OOH, CTV and digital audio.”
With Blis, you’re not managing isolated buys across disconnected platforms. You’re tracking one audience across the full funnel under a single targeting and measurement approach.
3. You’re told to ‘target smarter’ but no one tells you where the buyers are
It’s a line we’ve all heard before: ‘target smarter’, but what does that actually look like in a media plan?
According to Barry Collins, Commercial Director, Media and Insights APAC at Circana, it starts with moving from assumptions to actual demand.
“It’s all around focusing your advertising spend where demand actually is.”
Circana brings that demand to life with postcode level data, product level sales trends and even competitor hotspots. So instead of spreading media thin across generic segments, you’re putting it where it counts.
“You can see where that audience is, where they’re shopping, where they’re spending… and then scale back in areas where you’re wasting money.”
Blis takes those insights and puts them into action by activating location powered media across mobile, CTV, OOH and more. One partnership. One demand map. Real world targeting that actually reflects where people are and what they’re purchasing.
4. You’ve got insights, but they never inform the creative
During the panel, one campaign example from Justin stood out. It didn’t just show strong results, it unpacked the audience behaviours driving them.
A QSR brand was launching a new menu and wanted to do more than build awareness. They wanted to understand who was converting and why.
Leveraging Mastercard’s Ad Insights and Test & Learn solutions, they were able to reach high frequency QSR shoppers with media and measure business outcomes in the form of incremental sales lift.
The campaign delivered a more than 5 percent sales uplift and shed new insights into consumers segments that drove the highest uplift such as grocery buyers and tech savvy consumers, changing the way the brand thought about its audience.
5. You’ve launched a conquesting campaign, but can’t prove it actually stole share
On a plan, conquesting is a no brainer. Target a competitor’s audience. Shift market share. Show your client you won the battle.
But how do you prove that actually happened?
Barry shared how Circana and Blis tackled this challenge for a cereal brand in the UK.
“We supported the team at Blis in identifying geo areas across the UK where Kellogg’s Crave really heavily over indexed, where they’re really winning.”
From there, the targeting kicked in with media served directly into those competitor strongholds.
“We targeted those locations through different channels… and when we measured the outcome, the incremental ROAS was about 2.26, above and beyond the spend.”
That’s not theoretical conquesting. That’s knowing where the competition is winning and seeing where you can shift behaviour in response. With Circana mapping the market and Blis driving the media, the agency could show exactly where they stole share, postcode by postcode.
So what now?
Audience-targeting challenges aren’t going anywhere, but with Blis, in partnership with Circana and Mastercard, you can plan smarter, measure what matters, and truly future-proof your media strategy for what comes next.
If you’re ready to bring these ideas into your next brief, we’d love to chat.