Right now.
A snapshot of what I'm actually doing — operating, advising, building, thinking, reading. Updated as the work ships. October 2026.
This is a /now page.
Season 2 finale is out — Where the Surplus SettlesSep 23 · Cologne Moderated “From Data to Impact: How Martech Drives Real Business Growth” at DMEXCO 2026 (Tech Stage). Watch the recording ↗
16 Fridays, one question.
Two seasons, 16 polls, 786 ballots. Season 1 asked who can be held to an agent's action; Season 2 asked where the surplus settles once agents can act. Every week's ballot and both finales are in the archive below.
Past seasons.
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S2
Where advantage, money, and power move once agents can act. 8 Fridays · 274 ballots · Nos. 09–16The finale — Where the Surplus Settles → Discussion ↗- W1 Jul 31
When every advertiser has a capable buying agent, what creates the edge?
Proprietary data closed at 78% of 42 ballots — Faster execution, Privileged access, and Clearer mandate split the rest at 9%, 7%, and 4%. Season 2 opened with a thesis that advantage moves to the quality of the mandate once intelligence commoditizes; the room didn’t buy it yet — they still named the asset that won the last cycle.
- W2 Aug 7
When agents decide what gets considered, what becomes the new shelf space?
Retrieval results and Paid recommendations tied at 31% each of 16 ballots — Training data and Default integrations trailed at 18% apiece: the room split evenly between the two levers that already exist to buy visibility, not the newer training-data or default-integration routes.
- W3 Aug 14
What will autonomous buying agents ultimately buy?
Outcomes closed at 57% of 73 ballots — the clearest majority of the season so far — with Impressions at 27%, Audiences 8%, Attention 6%. The room endorsed the week’s thesis: the unit of trade follows the result, not the delivery. A quarter still defend the impression, which is the constituency every outcome-priced model has to win over or route around.
- W4 Aug 21
What will buyer and seller agents negotiate hardest?
Success criteria edged Price 34% to 32% of 55 ballots — the tightest finish of the season — with Audience definitions and Liability at 16% each. Read as a block, two-thirds of the room said the hardest negotiation is no longer the price line but the things that were never really settled before agents had to write them down: what counts, whose audience, who owns the miss.
- W5 Aug 28
Which intermediary function remains most valuable when agents transact directly?
Assuming risk took 42% of 19 ballots, more than the two information functions combined were worth on their own: finding counterparties and verifying results tied at 21%, and negotiating price finished last at 16%. A week earlier a third of the room called price the hardest thing agents will negotiate. Asked what an intermediary is worth paying for, almost nobody picked it. Hard and worth paying for turn out to be different properties, and the room separated them.
- W6 Sep 4
When every seller can claim performance, what wins the bid?
Verifiable outcomes took 54% of 37 ballots — more than exclusive supply, proprietary data and lowest price drew combined. The two scarcity plays the industry has run on for twenty years finished at the bottom: exclusive supply 10%, proprietary data 13%. Lowest price came second at 21%, which is the more interesting number: asked what wins a bid once everyone can claim performance, the room expects the fallback to be price rather than inventory or data. A week earlier the same audience said risk-bearing was the intermediary function worth paying for. Both weeks point the same way — once prediction is abundant, the premium moves to whoever can be held to the claim afterwards.
- W7 Sep 11
If an agent chooses the brand, who owns the customer relationship?
Nineteen ballots split almost four ways: the consumer 31%, the brand and the agent platform tied on 26%, the data holder last on 15%. First to second is about one vote at this sample, so the reading is that the room did not converge, not that consumer ownership won. The split is the result. Four senses of the word own were on the ballot (intent, fulfilment, interface, record), each with a legitimate claim, which is why a question that looks like a disagreement is really a definition problem. The data holder finishing last is the sharpest correction to Week 6: the room had just said verifiable outcomes win the bid, then declined to hand the holder of the record the relationship that comes with it.
- W8 Sep 18
Where will agentic market power concentrate?
Thirteen ballots, the smallest room of the run: executing trades 53%, verifying outcomes 23%, setting objectives 15%, controlling access 7%. Asked to rank its own season, the room put execution first, which is the case law's answer rather than the essay's. The two options that finished last in Week 1 (clearer mandate 4%, privileged access 7%) finished last again as setting objectives and controlling access. On thirteen ballots the order holds and the margins do not. The finale's reply: surplus settles where refusal binds, and execution's binding refusals, first look and last look, are the ones a court has just ordered stopped.
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S1
From standards to the standard that matters. 8 Fridays · 512 ballots · Nos. 01–08The finale — The Answerer of Record → Discussion ↗- W1 Jun 5
If AI can understand “anything,” do we still need standards?
an 87% landslide — the market’s least ambiguous answer: AI raises the value of standards rather than replacing them.
- W2 Jun 12
What will be the first AI-native form of fraud?
68% picked authenticity frauds we already have — synthetic audiences + attribution. The one genuinely agentic failure mode, agency laundering, came last. The blind spot is accountability, not authenticity.
- W3 Jun 19
At what point does an AI recommendation become an AI decision?
A 65% majority put the line at the withdrawal of human review — not automation (4%) or money moving (24%); only 6% said it never crosses. The room read the recommendation-to-decision boundary as an accountability handoff, not a technical one.
- W4 Jun 26
In an agentic market, what becomes the most valuable asset?
Trust closed at a 52% majority — Data second at 33%, Compute and Distribution tied at 8% each, 52 votes. The reflex answer (Data, the asset that won the last cycle) lost decisively to the one this cycle actually makes scarce: whose agent is allowed to act.
- W5 Jul 3
Which metric breaks first when agents become the primary buyers?
Three fragile inference metrics clustered at 28–35% while ROAS sat alone at 5% — the room re-ranked the cluster all week and never moved ROAS.
- W6 Jul 10
Who should be accountable for an agent’s decision?
The Agent Owner closed at 50% of 91 ballots — the season’s biggest room — double Shared Responsibility’s 25%, with vendor and user barely claimed: accountability concentrates on whoever deploys and constrains the agent, and the room read “shared” as the absence of an assignment, not a model of one.
- W7 Jul 17
What will agents optimize for?
Business Outcomes closed at 54% of 51 ballots — beating Lowest Cost (23%) and Highest ROAS (11%) combined, with User Satisfaction last at 9%: asked what agents should actually optimize for, the room chose outcomes over cost or return — the same room six weeks of accountability questions had already been persuading.
- W8 Jul 24
In 5 years, what will be the most important standard?
Trust & Accountability closed at 40% of 81 ballots, ahead of Agent Protocols (29%), Measurement (17%), and Identity (12%): asked which standard will matter most in five years, the room chose accountability over communication, measurement, or identity — the same convergence seven weeks of standards-to-stakes questions had been pointing toward all along.
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Agentic Transformation
The most active work right now is helping companies move from AI pilots to governed agentic workflows: decision rights, tool access, evaluation, fallbacks, semantic infrastructure, and measurable business outcomes.
I'm also experimenting with a live AdCP Ecosystem prototype — a visual model for how agentic advertising workflows could coordinate signals, identity, governance, creative, buying, clean rooms, and measurement around a live brief.
Three lanes,
in parallel.
- Day jobGlobal Head of Enterprise · Samba TVBuilding the enterprise commercial motion across global markets — product, partnerships, and the buyer-side conversation about agentic measurement.
- FounderNo Fluff AdvisoryOperator-led advisory for AdTech, MarTech, data, AI, and SaaS companies entering or scaling in the US. Fifteen specialized playbooks: six vertical (Audio, Gaming, Travel, Performance & Native, Attention, Mobile App Growth) + nine operating (Growth Operating System, Org Design for Scale-Ups, Enterprise Data Collaboration, Retention & Expansion, Agentic Transformation, Commercial Productization, Commercial Architecture, Outcome Underwriting, Measurement Governance). Three engagement shapes: Audit, Sprint, Retainer. Newest practice area: AI Visibility & GEO Advisory — making vendors the source AI engines cite, every technique run on this site first. Selective.
- StandardsAdCP Founding Member · Signals & Measurement WG Co-LeadCo-leading the Signals & Measurement working group of the Ad Context Protocol — the open standard for agentic advertising. Shipping the reference signals adaptor in the open.
In the open.
- Who Does the Shopping?A public-source research paper on agentic commerce: which shopping tasks have moved to software and under whose authority, across twelve documented buying routes and the ACP, UCP and AP2 specifications, with a sandbox study, a survey comparison, an organic-reporting map and a merchant contribution worksheet. Includes an external critical review adjudicated finding by finding. Published on-site rather than through an outlet.
- What Can Leave the Room?A public-source research paper on data collaboration: what nine clean-room and data-sharing products document a buyer may receive, retain, reuse and rebuild, where delivery and deletion proof stops, which agent routes are generally available, and thirteen acceptance tests to run before signing. Includes the corrections validation made to its starting dossier and to this site's own platform guides. Published on-site rather than through an outlet.
- Who Eats The Spending Gap When Agentic Spend Outpaces Proof Of Impact?AdExchanger Data-Driven Thinking. An AI agent can stay inside its budget and still spend too much, because the evidence arrives after the money is committed: the proof gap. A risk budget limits what may ride on an untested change, a contract assigns a defined loss to a counterparty, and a funded balance sheet has to back the promise to pay. The fourth piece in the series on signals, measurement and authority.
- The Evolution of Holding CompaniesA public-source research paper on the evolution of advertising holding companies: how buying scale, shared workflows and principal media sit side by side, what the record shows for Publicis, WPP, Omnicom and IPG, Dentsu, Havas and Stagwell, and three conditional paths — brand-controlled, agency-led and platform-dominated — for running marketing work as software takes on more of it. Published on-site rather than through an outlet.
- Paying AttentionPaying Attention tests the attention-measurement market on the public record: one MRC-accredited attention product; in the sources screened, no held-out evidence that attention predicts outcomes beyond time in view and no independent audit of guarantee delivery; and named vendors’ attention signals documented in agentic protocols only as schema representation, with conformance tests run on placeholder metrics. Published on-site rather than through an outlet.
Open questions.
- Agent-mediated measurement — what attribution looks like when buyer agents and seller agents negotiate the impression in real time
- Vector-based audience matching — graded similarity scores replacing the audience yes/no binary
- Operator + advisor as a permanent posture, not a transition state
- How thoughtful organizations stay thoughtful at 1,000+ people
- Board roles
- AdTech / MarTech / data — US, EMEA, APAC
- Advisory mandates
- Series B Scaleup (75–200 · $10–30M ARR) primary · Series A PMF selective
- Fractional GTM
- US market entry, BD partnerships
- Speaking
- DMEXCO, IAB events, podcasts, private salons
- Pro bono
- Skills-based consulting for mission-driven orgs (since 2015)
- Conversations
- About what AI is actually changing in advertising
Last updated October 2026 — stamped from the newest poll,
essay, byline or build on this page, so it can't go stale by neglect.
Drift > 90 days means I owe the commentary an update — feel free to nudge me.
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