Insights
Perspectives on marketing measurement, data strategy, and what actually works.
Why Good Tools End Up in the Graveyard
Tools don't fail teams. Humans fail tools. Here are the four categories where tools die on the vine, and four questions to ask before you sign anything new.
Are Tokens the New Headcount?
The question clients should be asking their agencies isn't "do you use AI?" It's "what is your token budget for this project, and how much of what I'm paying you is human vs. machine?" That question doesn't exist yet in most client conversations. It will.
You Made the Change. Now What?: Is your marketing team skipping the most important step?
The companies winning at marketing aren't necessarily smarter, better funded, or more creative. In a lot of cases they're doing one thing consistently that most companies skip. They close the loop.
The Performance Squeeze: Why "Do More With Less" Is Failing
Marketing leaders are being squeezed from every direction... flat budgets, rising CPAs, and a CEO who wants growth anyway. The instinct is to pull more reports, add another tool, talk to the agency again. But the problem is almost never the data, it's the foundation underneath it.
Jevons Paradox and the Saas Reckoning
I built something I'd been trying to find for twenty years with Claude Code, and it took less than an hour. If the cost of building exactly what you need just collapsed, why would anyone keep paying for someone else's idea of what you need?
Why Your Marketing Data Is Probably Wrong (And What to Do About It)
I've been in more than one meeting where every agency in the room is showing green numbers — social, performance, content, all trending up. Meanwhile I'm watching the CMO in the back of the room, and they don't look satisfied. They look uneasy.
The 90-Day Content Experiment: Can Showing Up Actually Build Trust?
B2B marketing is a hot mess right now and nobody seems to agree on what's working. So I decided to stop asking and start testing. Here's my 90-day content experiment.
How to Run a Smarter Marketing Experiment Without Burning Budget
Most marketing experiments fail before they start — not because the idea was bad, but because the setup was. Here's how to design tests that actually produce usable results.
How Misaligned Metrics Create Friction Between Marketing and Finance
Marketing measures engagement. Finance measures revenue. Neither team is wrong — but the gap between their dashboards is where trust breaks down and budgets get cut.
Why Your CAC Is Rising (And Where Your Budget Is Actually Leaking)
Your customer acquisition cost went up 15% this quarter and nobody can explain why. The answer isn't in your ad platform — it's in the gaps between them.
The Attribution Gap (Where Budget Disappears Between Channels)
You're spending across five channels but your attribution model only sees three. The budget that disappears between platforms isn't wasted — it's invisible.
What Every Marketer Needs to Know About Incrementality (Without the Jargon)
Incrementality answers the only question that matters: would this conversion have happened anyway? Here's what it means, how to test it, and why most teams skip it.
5 Quick Wins to Prove Marketing ROI in 30 Days
Make your boss look good this month — no new tools required. Five practical moves that prove marketing impact with data you already have.
Human-in-the-Loop Marketing — Why Algorithms Alone Aren't Enough
Your marketing stack has never been smarter. Machine learning models crunch millions of touchpoints. Algorithms optimize bids in real-time. But the best results still need a human in the loop.
Why Attribution Isn't Just for Enterprise Giants
You've seen the demos. The enterprise attribution platforms with their impressive dashboards, their "proprietary algorithms," their army of analysts. But attribution isn't only for the Fortune 500.
3 Signs Your Attribution Model Is Costing You Customers
You've got the dashboard. You've got the data. You've got weekly reports that look impressive in slide decks. So why does it feel like your marketing budget is working against you?
The Goldilocks Approach: Finding Attribution That's Not Too Simple, Not Too Complex
Sitting at the marketing desk, have you ever felt stuck between attribution tools that oversimplify your data or bury you in complexity? There's a middle path.
The Hidden Costs of "Set It and Forget It" Attribution Models
As a marketing leader juggling tight budgets, have you ever deployed an attribution model, celebrated the initial setup, and then never looked at it again? You're not alone — and it's costing you.
Why Marketing Attribution Feels Broken — and What to Do About It
You're staring at a dashboard full of conflicting reports — one platform claims your latest campaign drove record conversions, while another says it barely moved the needle. Sound familiar?
You Can't Track the Model. You Can Only Measure the Market.
Organic measurement is evolving. GEO, AI-generated search results, and the death of click-through tracking are forcing marketers to rethink what measurement even means.
Marketing Spend Is Rising in 2026. Trust in Measurement Isn't.
Budgets are going up. Confidence in what those budgets produce is going down. The measurement gap is the biggest unaddressed risk in marketing today.
Stop Trying to Track Individual Birds. Watch the Flock.
What predictive sciences can teach marketers about measurement in a post-cookie world. You don't need to follow bird #25. You need to understand how the flock moves.
Stop Collecting Data You Don't Use
Most companies collect far more data than they act on. Align your data collection to your actual decision-making — not to what your tools make easy to capture.
Why Big Holdco Agencies Fail Most Brands
The holding company model is structurally misaligned for most brands. Data is bundled as an afterthought with media and creative. Great people, wrong structure.
Why CMOs Are Burning Out: You're Responsible for Revenue but Don't Control the Data
CMO tenure is shrinking. The root cause isn't strategy — it's misaligned accountability. You own the revenue target but someone else owns the data that proves it.
Why Structured Metadata Is the Most Underused Superpower in Marketing Measurement
Your taxonomy is a mess. And it's costing you more than you think. Structured metadata is the foundation AI needs to actually help you optimize — and most teams skip it.
CAC Is Lying to You: What CFOs and CMOs Actually Need Going Into 2025
Customer acquisition cost is the metric everyone watches and nobody questions. It's probably wrong. Here's what to measure instead — and how to get finance and marketing on the same page.
Why Most Marketers Are Driving Their Budgets in Reverse
Rearview-mirror analytics tell you what happened. Predictive optimization tells you what to do next. Most teams are still driving forward while looking backward.