The television advertising business has spent decades promising that someday, somehow, it would prove that commercials actually make people buy things. That day is not today. But the industry would like you to know it is preparing quite diligently for that day to arrive, perhaps in the coming years.

"I think it's an iterative process over the next couple of years," said Robert Voltaggio, president of advertising sales at Warner Bros. Discovery, deploying the word "iterative" in the manner of someone who has sat through many conferences. "I think both the sell side and the buy side have to get a little bit more comfortable with the outcomes and understand them a bit more."

The difficulty, as it turns out, is that television is not the internet. People do not click on television commercials. (Yes, QR codes exist, but as the industry has tacitly acknowledged, people do not click on those either.) This creates something of a measurement problem for an industry that would like to charge advertisers based on whether their ads actually worked.

Paramount has been testing an ad product called Precision+, which allows brands to aim for specific conversion outcomes — website visits, registrations, that sort of thing. The company is not, however, charging advertisers based on those outcomes.

"We're still transacting on a traditional basis, but we are working against a benchmark conversion target," said Leo O'Connor, executive vice president of streaming at Paramount's advertising division. The key word there is "benchmark," which is industry parlance for "we are still figuring this out."

There are also complications beyond the merely technical. A commercial's effectiveness can be influenced by factors that have nothing to do with the commercial itself — retailers failing to stock products, for instance, or a world leader imposing tariffs and disrupting the global economy. (One imagines the sales department would prefer not to stake its compensation on such externalities.)

"The thing we have to remember when we guarantee on outcomes: We can only control so much," said John Kozack, president of United States advertising sales and marketing at TelevisaUnivision.

For now, the networks are offering outcome measurement as a way to make advertisers feel better about writing checks, while quietly building the historical data that might someday allow them to charge based on results. It is, as these things go, a reasonable plan. Whether it will still seem reasonable in a few years, when "the coming years" have arrived and everyone is still iterating, remains to be seen.

Original story published in Digiday: "Future of TV Briefing: How TV and streaming networks are laying the groundwork for outcome-based buying"