Measurement & Currency.
iROAS, MMM, attribution, and the limits of what a browser or a street will let you observe — how advertising decides what counts, and which numbers survive an audit.
- 01Aug 2026
Nobody Sells an Outcome
Season 2's third poll asked what autonomous buying agents will ultimately buy, and 73 ballots produced the clearest majority of the season: Outcomes at 57%, with Impressions at 27%, Audiences at 8%, Attention at 6%. The room voted for the one unit on the list that nobody can currently sell, because selling an outcome means warranting it, and warranting it means pricing the failure case. That pricing function — Outcome Underwriting — is the institution the whole result quietly depends on: a definition both sides accept, a measurement both sides trust, a settlement window, and someone who pays when the outcome doesn't happen. The first three are measurement work. The fourth is capital. Outcome optimization exists inside the walled gardens; outcome insurance does not. Owned loops reprice faster and sometimes carry action-level variance, but no scaled platform guarantees the advertiser's business result. My vote went to Outcomes anyway — for where the market ends, not for what's tradable now — and the 27% who voted Impressions weren't nostalgic; they named the only unit with a working settlement stack, which is why it gets demoted to the receipt rather than killed.
- 02Aug 2026
Measurement, on the Street's Terms
The most-declined question in this site's ask box last week was how to measure DOOH and place-based media. The answer: a DOOH number is one near-observed event, one auditable claim, and three models stacked on top — a chain the channel has been honest about since 1933. Run the Instrumentation Test in reverse and the punchline lands: the channel everyone calls unmeasurable is the one where reach and frequency still mean something.
- 03Jul 2026
Business Outcomes Isn't a Number
Friday's poll asked what agents will optimize for, and 54% of 51 ballots said Business Outcomes — more than Lowest Cost and Highest ROAS combined. This essay's answer to why: Business Outcomes was never a fourth number competing with the other three. Lowest Cost, Highest ROAS, and User Satisfaction are each a single scalar an optimizer can directly maximize — and a single scalar is exactly what gets gamed. Business Outcomes can't be scalarized the same way, which is the point: the room didn't vote for a better objective function. It voted against handing the agent one at all.
- 04Jul 2026
AMC Is Free Now — Sort Of: What Amazon's Clean-Room Democratization Actually Changes
Amazon opened AMC to all sponsored-ads advertisers in Sept 2025. What's free, what still costs, what the 100-user threshold hides, and what expires Dec 2026.
- 05Jul 2026
Measurement for Agentic Commerce
The agent doesn't click, doesn't see ads, and buys anyway. A breaks/survives/emerges triage of commerce measurement, and the instrumentation to build now.
- 06Jul 2026
Measurement, on the Browser's Terms
The W3C Attribution API debate, read as a constitutional question. Mozilla's Martin Thomson says the quiet part precisely: the test of any privacy technology is not the information flows — it is who decides. The browser is bidding to become the counterparty that grants measurement its standing, and every operator concern in the spec follows from that one move.
- 07Jul 2026
The Metric That Was Never About You
Friday's poll asked which marketing metric breaks first once agents become the primary buyers. This essay's answer is Attention, and for a mechanical reason: it was never a measurement of the market — it was an inference about something no one could directly observe. Reach & Frequency and Attribution make the same category error one layer removed. ROAS survives by accident, not merit. And the record that replaces all three isn't a better guess — it's the first time anyone could just read the answer instead of inferring it.
- 08Jul 2026
The CMO Owns the Action Space
Measurement stops explaining the past and starts issuing permissions. The post-agentic CMO's deliverable is not a channel plan — it is guardrail architecture. Here is the ownership split, the operating loop that already works, and the ten-question procurement test.
- 09Dec 2025
Part 4: Why Your Campaign Reports Are Already Obsolete
From post-mortem PowerPoints to continuous learning systems. The 90-day learning lag is killing performance — and attribution theater has us making million-dollar calls on correlation dressed up as causation. Here's what changes when learning happens in milliseconds, not months.
- 10Apr 2025
From Meridian to NNN: How Transformers Are Redefining Marketing Mix Modeling
Google's NNN brings Transformer self-attention to Marketing Mix Modeling — moving past Meridian's parametric assumptions to learn temporal dependencies, cross-channel synergies, and creative nuance directly from aggregated data. ~22% lift in predictive accuracy on early benchmarks.
- 11Apr 2025
Attention Isn’t Enough—The Future of Marketing is Relevance
Introducing the EARO framework — Exposure, Attention, Relevance, Outcome — with 22 metrics across four dimensions.
- 12Jan 2022
The Future of Addressability = $100B
When you run a quick keyword search of "addressability" on LinkedIn titles and get hundreds of roles, it is a clear indication that the time has come to write something provocative and radical as $100B+ on the subject. This narrative is...00B+ of post-cookie open-web spend. The four addressability paths and which ones survive 2023.00B+ of post-cookie open-web spend. The four addressability paths and which ones survive 2023.00B+ of post-cookie open-web spend. The four addressability paths and which ones survive 2023.
- 13Sep 2015
Data is the New Currency to power Attribution
Why the DMP is the foundation for multi-touch attribution and the connective tissue across marketing channels.
- 14Aug 2015
Debunking cross-device myth
Deterministic vs probabilistic matching. The eight questions to ask every cross-device vendor before signing.