"My Real Persona is My Offline World": Rob Garber, Adsquare

by Dana Lee on 12th Aug 2026 in Video Interviews

In this episode of A Coffee With... Rob Garber, global vice president, agencies and brands at Adsquare, joins ExchangeWire's John Still over a flat white to chat the outcomes era and online versus real-world personas.

After a nearly 25-year career in media, Rob transitioned into ad tech and data—the intelligence layer he sees as the industry’s future. AdSquare is a real-world intelligence company using consented mobile advertising IDs (non-PII) to understand people’s movements and help brands plan, activate, and measure campaigns.

The conversation highlights the enduring importance of offline interactions, which reflect people's true personas more accurately than online behaviour. As most consumer purchases still happen in the physical world, measuring these outcomes is essential to capture the holistic impact of media campaigns. This enables businesses to meet executive demands for ROI and plan more effectively.

Evolution of the Outcomes Era

While the outcomes era may sound new, the desire to measure results has always existed; the difference is the sophistication of tools used to track them. Early digital focused on impressions and CTR, then progressed to systematic online attribution via cookies/IDs. Now, brands can also link ads to changes in recall, favourability, and purchase.

In today’s macroeconomic climate, there is growing demand from CEOs and CFOs to justify marketing spend with clear ROI. This requires moving beyond proxy metrics such as viewability and attention and towards true business results like sales. The industry must bridge measurement gaps to monitor the full 360° of campaigns, including offline results that have historically been undervalued.

Significance of Offline Outcomes

Rob contends that offline personas offer a richer, more accurate profile for targeting than online personas, which can be aspirational—for example, browsing luxury cars they will not buy. The majority of global retail purchases still occur offline. Brands that only track online outcomes miss the advertising impact on the largest share of their sales, underestimating the total value of their media strategy.

The Covid-19 pandemic reinforced the value of physical, real-world interactions. Events like Cannes, DMEXCO, and the upcoming ATS London, are where people truly connect and learn. This aligns with AdSquare’s belief that the physical world is where people live, create value, and generate impactful, privacy-compliant data crucial for modern advertising.

Measuring Offline Outcomes

To avoid conflicts of interest, AdSquare supplies data without selling media. Rob advises looking under the hood of data partners: how data is collected, used, and validated. Vendors selling media and measuring it may pose conflicts via margins and incentives. Choosing independent, compliant data-only partners helps to ensure credible measurement and optimisation.

AdSquare takes two approaches to measuring offline outcomes. The first is a daily visit data feed, which enables near real-time optimisation to improve media efficiency. The second covers end-of-campaign analysis and measurement reports that quantify incremental uplift. By correlating exposure data with in-store visitation and purchase data, businesses can derive key learnings and insights for future campaigns.