Data-Driven Thinking Archives

Google’s Bidding Change Proves Agentic Advertising Has An Agency Problem

Google Ads recently changed how target-based bidding behaves on budget-limited campaigns. The algorithm now bids more aggressively to track closer to whatever target ROAS or CPA you’ve set, regardless of historical performance. Google flagged the change in advance and was transparent about the expected outcome: a campaign with a $10 target CPA that has been […]

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Data-Driven Thinking

Marketers, The Free Token Lunch Is Over. Is Your Stack Ready?

Anthropic just dropped Claude Sonnet 5, reigniting a broader debate about how AI should be priced. Some argue that published token rates no longer tell the full economic story because changes in token consumption and model behavior, such as the use of reasoning tokens, can materially affect real-world costs. Meanwhile, other alternatives like Fable 5 […]

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Data-Driven Thinking

I Used An AI Agent To Do My Back-To-School Shopping. It Was Easy. So Why Do I Feel Sad?

Back-to-school shopping is one of my most treasured late-summer activities. When the school supply list came out as a kid, I would wait with anticipation until my mom could drive me to Office Max in her minivan. I’d spend as long as I could in the store deliberating between seven different types of highlighters and […]

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Data-Driven Thinking

Your Team Is Working Faster With AI, But Are They Really Getting Better Results?

A lot of marketing leaders are wondering whether AI is really bringing incremental value to their business. Teams are moving faster than ever. Campaign briefs, social copy, first-pass creative and competitive research can now be produced in a fraction of the time it used to take. Yet it’s not clear if the work is actually […]

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Data-Driven Thinking

For Agentic Advertising To Work, We Must Decide What AI Can Never Touch

Every company in our space is wrestling with what their agentic AI strategy is. The answer that seems obvious is to wire up an LLM, give it access to Meta or Google through MCP and put it to work. The reality is more complicated, and the complications matter a lot when it’s your budget on […]

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Data-Driven Thinking

Walmart’s Wall: Will The Vibe Deal Make It Meta, Or Another AOL?

Build a wall around the right property, and people will line up to get inside. Build one around the wrong property, and eventually you’re the person asking if anyone remembers their AOL password. Meta is the clean success case. For all the industry’s complaints about opacity, Meta became a walled garden marketers could not ignore […]

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Data-Driven Thinking

Ad Tech’s Trust Problem Isn’t Going Away. We Just Stopped Talking About It

I’ve spent over 25 years in this industry, and I’ve staked the last eight of them on a simple bet: a business rooted in responsible practices isn’t at odds with commercial success. It’s hard for me to watch what’s happening right now and stay quiet. Hims & Hers built its business on patients trusting it […]

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Data-Driven Thinking

Ad Tech’s Last Neutral Party Just Picked A Side

When Publicis Groupe announced its $2.167 billion acquisition of LiveRamp, the industry found itself asking a question it had never had to ask before. LiveRamp wasn’t one identity vendor among many. It was the connective tissue letting competing agencies, brands and platforms move data and identity across each other’s walled gardens, on the understanding that […]

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Data-Driven Thinking

AI Can Interpret Data. It Can’t Vouch For It

The next internet will not be built by humans clicking buttons; it will be built by agents acting on behalf of people, brands, publishers, platforms and enterprises. Some of these agents will be simple workflow assistants. Others will manage budgets, audiences, inventory and outcomes with increasing autonomy across systems that were never designed to work […]

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Data-Driven Thinking

Three Advertising Industry Myths The Market Has Already Debunked

Every industry develops narratives that begin as useful simplifications and eventually become accepted truths. Advertising is no different. But the problem is that many of these narratives survive long after the market has stopped validating them. The industry says streaming television is becoming a performance channel, then acts surprised when television behaves like television and […]

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