Happy Sunday, Everyone!

I hope you’re all enjoying the August sun and (hopefully) getting in some well-deserved and much-needed rest/relaxation/family time, before the back to school and the end of Q3 kicks into high gear.

For this week’s issue, I want to discuss a topic that I spend an inordinate amount of time thinking about, but I almost never hear discussed: advertising investment strategy + capital allocation. If you read that last sentence and thought, “I have no earthly idea what he’s talking about…” – then this is the issue you should read.

I started my career in finance - 5+ years spent living in spreadsheets, building models and finding every possible way to squeeze every dime of profit out of development projects. Then I made the (very natural) switch to advertising….where I’ve done a lot of the same. The numbers in the spreadsheets changed, but the fundamentals of what we’re trying to achieve (maximize risk-adjusted returns; minimize capital required and risk) did not. In fact, there was only one major thing that changed:

(Virtually) no one in marketing talks about capital allocation or investment philosophy.

Sure, some of us hint at it in new business pitches or when we talk about how we approach ad accounts, but vanishingly few people/agencies have articulated a philosophy for how they approach making investments on behalf of their clients (internal or external).

I want to change that.

Before we dive in, let’s take a step back. For most companies, marketing/growth is one of the largest line items on their P&L every year. It’s the lifeblood of the enterprise – if marketing fails to perform, growth slows (or stops altogether). If that happens, we all know what follows: stagnation. And stagnation is death. I - along with many others - have written plenty on the tactical/mechanical/strategic drivers of marketing failure; but the more I’ve thought about this, the stronger my conviction that those things are only 20% of the problem. The 80%? The investment philosophy that underpins the entire strategy. This is no different from your retirement or real estate investments: if you get the big stuff (you pick the right market, avoid the big mistakes), you can endure more than a few tactical bumps and still wind up massively ahead.

I talked about this topic in a keynote in Lancaster, PA a few years ago - and the response I got (especially from big agency people) was this: Madison Avenue isn’t Wall Street. Marketing doesn’t work like finance. And when you try to approach marketing investments like you would financial investments, you’re doing it wrong.

I think that’s bullshit. I did then, and nothing in the intervening years has done a damn thing to change my mind.

When you buy a stock (or a piece of real estate, or a bond, or whatever), you’re making an investment decision: what is my expected return, over what time period, and with what risk profile? For each potential investment, you consider those three questions, weight the answers according to your own preferences (some investors are more conservative than others; we all have different time horizons for realizing returns; each of us has a certain tolerance for risk + volatility. None of these are right or wrong; they’re just different).

My contention is that advertising is exactly the same: when you buy an ad unit, you’re buying an expected value. If the expected value is greater than your cost, and if that value is realized over a suitable time horizon, your returns are positive. If it isn’t? They’re negative. From a fundamentals standpoint, every time you buy an ad, you’re making an investment.

So why do most marketers (and CMOs and CEOs) treat their marketing investments like paying the electric bill or the rent – as if it's an expense to be minimized as opposed to capital to be allocated. This is a fundamental mistake. Marketing budgets aren’t costs to be minimized; they’re capital to be allocated. Wall Street understands this intuitively. Madison Avenue doesn’t. And the gap between those two mindsets is why so many CMOs fail to unlock the true compounding power of their marketing dollars.

Over the next two issues, I want to share how I apply my personal investing philosophy to client ad budgets and ad accounts. It’s a framework that has helped me avoid the traps of short-term thinking, smooth the emotional rollercoaster of daily results, and ultimately compound results in ways most competitors miss.

This issue contains Parts I & II, which focus on capital allocation and investment philosophy; next week's issue contains Parts III, IV & V focus on portfolio construction, management rules & contrarian approaches that can produce outsized returns.

Without further ado, let’s get to it:

Part I: Marketing’s Many Capital Allocation Problems

One of the most persistent issues I see when auditing ad accounts is an implicit failure to understand how compounding + growth occurs. That may seem harsh, but it’s true. This starts with how budgets are set, and bleeds into how the accounts are run and optimized. The end result is middling performance - good enough to avoid getting fired, but no-where close to the account’s true potential.

Most Marketers Have No Capital Allocation Philosophy

When I talk to CMOs or CEOs, one of the first questions I ask is: how did you arrive at your current budget allocation across campaigns/channels?

The most common response I get is something along the lines of, “I don’t understand the question – we had $XXX,XXX budgeted each month, so we split that across Meta, Google + TikTok. We then split each platform’s share based on how many campaigns we had with some adjustments for how much each campaign could spend.”

To put actual numbers to this, I recently spoke with a brand spending about $300,000 per month across Meta, Google & Programmatic. Each channel had a $100,000/mo budget. Google had 5 campaigns, Meta had 10, Programmatic had 8. Each campaign had a $20,000/$10,000/$12,500 monthly budget. Perfectly balanced, as if Thanos himself had set them up.

The problem: ad markets aren’t neat, tidy or balanced. Channel performance is not uniform across days, weeks or months. What is convenient for accounting turns out to be cancerous to growth.

When I actually looked in the account, I found that the Google non-branded search campaign was returning $60 CPAs ($40 under the target of $100) while being budget-capped. The competitor campaign was at $140 (also budget capped). The use case campaign (focused on more informational searches) was right at $100 CPA, but 3 core use cases were posting a $75 CPA, while the other 12 ranged from $100 to $275.

This is a capital allocation disaster. The top-level returns ($100 CPA account-wide) looked fine, but that was just because the winners were masking the horrific performance of the losers. Forget optimization and management – this account would perform 20% to 30% better simply with improved capital allocation. No new landers or keywords or creatives or audiences – just setting the right budgets + targets.

This is the equivalent of an investor allocating equal dollars to every stock in the S&P 500 – sure, it’s “fair”. It’s simple. But when you’re putting the same total dollars into Apple or Microsoft are you are into LKQ Corporation (yes, that’s a real company that’s really in the SP500), that’s not allocation; that’s laziness masquerading as diversification.

Going back to the above account, the math is brutal:

• The non-branded search campaign (CPA $60, target $100) can profitably deploy an extra $30k each month, netting ~450 more customers (adjusting for some CPA increases as the campaign scales).
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• Meanwhile, the competitor campaign (CPA $140, target $100) and those 12 use cases are incinerating money. When deployed into those two campaigns/ad groups, the same $30k nets just 190 customers at a cost that isn’t tenable (read: you’re losing money on virtually every one).
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• Because the non-branded search is SO good, it masks the losses posted by the competitor and some of the use cases – so the client doesn’t think Google is broken.
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• Even allocation results in the non-branded search campaign being limited to just $20k, while the competitor and use-case campaigns underperform by ~260 customers (~450 if the non-branded campaign was given the $30k vs. the ~190 the other two campaigns delivered).

The end result? You’re not “managing risk.” You’re averaging down. You’re ensuring mediocrity, because your allocation choices were driven by neat columns in a spreadsheet instead of real-world performance.

A smarter, performance-responsive allocation almost never looks even. It looks concentrated, with the campaigns that are producing the best returns being funded until they hit diminishing returns, and the underperformers starved of capital until they either rebound or stop serving altogether (aka die). Investors call this survivorship concentration. Marketers should too. Winners deserve more capital. Losers deserve none.

While your spreadsheet won’t look neat-and-tidy, your monthly reports will make the client’s eyes sparkle as s/he grins from ear-to-ear. Win some, lose some.

Monthly Budgets Are Growth Killers

A significant portion of the above account’s under-performance is capital allocation, but a non-insignificant portion of it is the driver behind it: the monthly budget. Each month, the CMO gets $300,000 to allocate.

Why? Because that’s what the CFO plugged into the spreadsheet.

Here’s the silliness: customers don’t buy on your schedule. Prospects don’t sign contracts because it’s the third week of your fiscal quarter. A customer doesn’t think, “Gee, if I waited to buy this widget until September 1, then Lululemon’s marketing team would be happier with my decision.”

People buy when their conditions demand it. It might be a sudden stimulus (i.e., the pipe under the sink cracked or the HVAC stopped working) or it might be a temporal trigger (i.e., their child’s school sent a note with the supplies needed for the upcoming school year) or might be erosion of resistance (i.e., they weren’t feeling great about their appearance, then their favorite pair of jeans stopped fitting, then they saw an IG ad for Caliber fitness, then they got winded when trying to play with their kids….and finally, one night, they decided to make a change…and went on a health / fitness buying bender).

At no point, in any of these examples, did the customer think about the brand’s budget or marketing calendar (unless they were trying to calculate whether they could hold out a bit longer to get a better deal).

If you could acquire 1,000 additional customers this month at or below your target CPA, why in the world would you not do it? Why would you choose to hold those dollars into the next month, when we all have no idea what’s going to happen? You have potential customers who could be acquired today at a reasonable, profitable cost – and you’re choosing to forego acquiring them in the hope that you can get them next month.

While it’s possible you might be able to pull that off, it’s equally possible (if not more likely) that conditions - both in ad markets and in your target audience’s lives - will be materially different next month vs. now. Generally speaking, the further out you go, the greater the range of potential outcomes (the further forward you try to project, the more uncertain the projection). Waiting to spend is actually increasing the risk profile of your marketing investments.

You read that right.

Customers are self-centered. They’re interested in buying when the conditions in their lives demand it. It might be the first cold night of fall, when the heater doesn’t kick on (or doesn’t heat the house). It might be that back-to-school email from the teacher, or the first math test that comes home with a “C”. It could be the first autumn breeze that seeps through the window in the home office (need better windows!) or their kid mastering the balance bike and looking longingly at the neighborhood kids on their pedal bikes. It could be the marketing director who just got her 2026 goals + budget back, and is reviewing what her agency did last year and wondering, “Are they going to be able to get me to the next level?”

Most of the demand captured by brands isn’t created by them; it’s created by the broader environment and (at best) channeled by the brand’s ads. Once you accept that, then ditching monthly budgets should become even easier – spend in response to market demand, not CFO schedules.

Put another way: your customers don’t care that it’s Q4. They buy when the pain is urgent, when the message resonates, when the offer clicks. If your campaigns are working in those moments but your budget is tapped, you’re literally forcing yourself to lose business.

Opportunities don’t care about your budget cycle.

Cutting off your campaigns when they are performing, solely because of an arbitrary budget is not discipline or being responsible; it’s laziness and irrationality. It’s the equivalent of refusing to buy more shares of a company you love at a price you adore, simply because you already hit your monthly allocation. Investors don’t say, “I’ll put the same $10,000 into the market on the 1st of every month, regardless of what’s happening.” They say, “When the price is right, I’ll allocate aggressively.”

Stop Losses Have Their Place

To be very clear, this is not me saying, “always spend!” – far from it. Stop losses have their place. Budget reductions have their place. In stock trading, you might cut a stock when breaks below a key level (like your entry point or the 200 WMA), especially if you believe that the decline is a result of something structural (bad management, bad strategy, moving market, etc.).

The same logic applies to advertising.

If a channel’s efficiency starts to crumble as you scale, the prudent thing isn’t to scale into declining returns, it’s to pull back to a stable and acceptable performance level (i.e. a lower budget and/or a more conservative target).

What should be clear is that this budget reduction isn’t being driven by a calendar or a budget cycle; it’s being driven by the fundamentals of both your customer’s reality and the ad market.

That’s rational risk management.

Most marketers stop here. They live in neat spreadsheets and tidy allocations, and they call it “management.” But this isn’t management. It’s accounting.

And accounting doesn’t compound.

Investors don’t build wealth by distributing their dollars evenly or obeying arbitrary calendars. They build wealth by following rules — hard rules — that force discipline when emotions, headlines, and herd behavior try to pull them off track.

The same principle applies to advertising. If every ad dollar is capital, then the way you allocate isn’t about neatness or compliance — it’s about philosophy. Rules that guide when to deploy, when to hold, when to pull back, and when to double down.

Which brings us to the core of the framework: the investing rules that govern my approach to advertising.

Part II: Core Rules For Advertising Investments

If Part I was the wrecking ball to the traditional approach, this is the path forward.

The truth is, most marketers don’t have rules. They have habits, tendencies and preferences. They manage by feel, by calendar and/or by what was done last quarter/year/whatever. That’s how you get lazy, even splits across channels, budget caps that crush growth and accounts that look dreamy in a spreadsheet but disappointing on the P&L. In short: that’s how you get mediocrity.

No one worth discussing aspires to that.

Successful investors don’t operate this way. They don’t wake up every morning asking, “How do I feel about Apple today?” or “Am I vibing with what Tommy Boy is doing over at $BMNR?” The very thought of allocating capital in that way is laughable. Investors have principles: hard, clear, non-negotiable rules that govern when to buy, when to hold, when to cut and when to double down.

Advertising demands the same discipline. If you treat every dollar like capital, then you need a philosophy for allocating it. Below are 5 rules I use to manage advertising investments, drawn directly from my personal investing philosophy.

Rule #1: Only Run What You Understand

Warren Buffett has been saying it for decades: “Never invest in a business you don’t understand.”

I couldn’t agree more - both when it comes to stocks AND when it comes to advertising.

Too many brands chase whatever’s shiny. TikTok launches a new ad format? They’re throwing money at trying to make it work. LinkedIn releases conversation ads? They’re bringing in a consultant to explore it. Some vendor pitches a “next-gen” attribution platform? They’ve sent the contract to the purchasing person before they’ve figured out what’s so revolutionary.

Here’s the problem: when you don’t understand the underlying mechanics, you can’t properly evaluate risk, expected return or the conditions under which performance might collapse.

• I recently audited a brand that was using an “AI powered” Google Ads management software (NOT Optmyzr) to run campaigns. No one could really explain what it did, other than it was $1,000/mo and it used machine learning to run the six-figure account. After a few hours in the account (and a few more in the change log), I found that all this (allegedly) smart thing did was run everything on broad match, auto-apply recommendations and feed landing pages into Gemini to create more headlines. 25% of the budget was being incinerated on obviously irrelevant terms, but that was being masked by branded search not being excluded from non-brand.
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• On the flip side, brands that stick to channels and tactics they understand can scale with confidence. When you know how the auction works, what signals matter, what creative tends to perform, how the ads appear in the feed and where the performance ceilings are, you’re not just spending money; you’re making calculated investments.

Missing hype cycles hurts less than falling victim to something you never understood in the first place. If you don’t understand it, don’t invest in it.

Rule #2: Think Long-Term - Because Day Trading Will Kill Your Account

Most marketers are guilty of day trading their ad accounts.

They watch performance like a stock ticker, obsessing over hour-by-hour CPA swings (or worse, by each click coming into the account), pulling budget from campaigns that look “red” and dumping money into ones that look “green.”

That’s not a strategy; that’s a frantic game of whack-a-mole that you’ll never win.

Day trading in your ad account is the marketing equivalent of selling Amazon because it dipped 3 percent this morning, then buying Peloton because it is surging 50% based on FinTwit or WallStBets. The likely outcome is that it will collapse 70% over the next year, and you’ll be left holding the bag.

The same is true in advertising. Data is noisy in the short run and signal-rich in the long run. Platforms + algorithms need time to stabilize. Audiences need time to see, consider and act. Offers need time to cycle through different buying windows. When you judge everything on a minute-by-minute basis, you’re not allocating your capital rationally. You’re gambling.

Many of the best campaigns I’ve ever run looked like losers at one point or another. One campaign in a legal account was downright dreadful for a solid 2 weeks – plowed through money ($900 CPCs add up quite quickly) and didn’t produce a single signed case. Most PPCers (and most clients) would kill the campaign - but I didn’t because the underlying performance was not as bad as the results suggested. While we didn’t sign a case, we did get a handful of excellent leads that failed to convert due to external factors. The searches were exactly what we wanted. The fundamentals were good. The outcomes were bad. Based on that, I convinced the client to stay the course, and over the following two weeks, we signed two massive cases - more than 20x the total investment.

If I would have treated this like a day-trading account, I would’ve pulled the budget and locked in my losses.

The investor parallel is clear. The market rewards those who can stomach short-term noise in order to realize long-term returns. The same discipline applies to ad spend. You don’t generate outsized returns by chasing what’s hot today; you achieve it by allowing the proverbial cream to rise to the top (aka by letting the fundamentals play out).

Patience is not passive. It’s an active decision to ignore the ticker, trust the process and allocate based on fundamentals, not feelings. In a landscape where everyone else is day trading their accounts, patience becomes your competitive edge.

Rule #3: Know Your Golden Channels

Not all channels/tactics/campaign types are equal.

In investing, there are two kinds of “golden” companies:

1. The ones you love and use every day
2. The ones you curse but can’t live without

Those are the companies you want in your portfolio, because those are companies that are likely to make you a LOT of money over time (assuming you have decent-to-good taste/preferences).

Advertising works the same way:

• Golden Channels You Love: TikTok, YouTube, Reddit, X, Email, retargeting – each one of them has favorable economics and positive tailwinds (people are finally catching on that YouTube might be the most valuable impression on the web)
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• Golden Channels You Hate But Need: Meta and Google. Everyone complains about them. Everyone says they’re inefficient, expensive, monopolistic, unfriendly and unpredictable. And yet, try to create a growth strategy that doesn’t include them

The art of allocation is knowing which are truly golden versus which are distractions. Golden channels earn more capital because they’re either inevitable (Google owns search, Meta owns social) or structurally advantaged (retargeting often produces the highest expected value impressions).

The danger is when marketers treat all channels as equally deserving. They’re not. Just like you don’t allocate the same amount of capital to a CarMax that you do to MSFT, you shouldn’t fund a speculative Quora experiment the same way you fund your non-branded search campaigns on Google.

The reality is that most brands would do better to identify their golden channels/campaigns and pour more money into them, vs. trying to sprinkle it around to everything (if you’re curious about my approach here, read this ancient article from 2023: https://samtomlinson.me/insights/simplify-your-marketing-world/).

Rule #4: Buy Into Non-Structural Weakness, Not Hype

Most marketers scale when costs rise and cut when costs fall. In most cases, doing that is categorically insane.

• CPMs spike? Budgets expand
• CPMs dip? Budgets shrink

That’s the advertising equivalent of buying tech stocks at all-time highs and dumping them at the bottom of a recession.

The rational media buyer does the opposite. When search CPCs drop at the end of the month because your competition is out of money, that’s your entry point. When inventory gets cheap because the market is jittery or because your competition has diverted funds to AppLovin, that’s when you start pushing more chips onto the table.

This is easy to write in a newsletter. It’s more difficult to do when you’re actually running an ad account.

One example: way back in April 2020 - during the early days of COVID - CPMs on Meta absolutely cratered down 20% to 40% (which was rational - the entire world was shutting down). Tens of thousands of brands paused their advertising while they waited for certainty (or, at the very least, clarity)....but a handful didn’t.

Those rare brands that pushed chips onto the table when everyone else was running away? They acquired customers for pennies on the dollar, because they recognized an asymmetric opportunity: either things were going to stabilize relatively quickly and people would still need stuff OR things were truly dire and we were careening toward some dystopian hellscape out of World War Z (in which case, the $100k they plowed into Meta ads wouldn't matter, anyway).

One thing worth mentioning: the non-structural part. Everything I’ve described above is non-structural weakness – it’s people being irrational or making mistakes, which shows up as cheaper costs for a short period of time. When search CPCs drop at the end of the month, it’s not because Google is broken or people aren’t searching anymore; it’s because other advertisers ran out of money and search is an auction-based platform. Structural weakness, on the other hand, is something to avoid – that’s when CPMs are cheap because the platform pulled a Quibi and has no users. That’s not a time to spend more - that’s a time to run away faster.

In the short term, auctions are irrational. In the long term, efficiency rewards contrarian discipline.

Rule #5: Lower Your Basis by Lowering the Cost of Learning

When I invest, I am often focused on lowering my basis - not just because I enjoy seeing big % increasing numbers, but because doing so maximizes my upside and reduces my overall risk. It creates a margin of safety and expands the room for compounding. Buying the same company cheaper improves my risk/reward profile.

Advertising works the same way.

Every platform/channel/campaign has an upfront basis. You are not just spending to acquire clicks or impressions; you’re paying to learn the platform/campaign type (either for your team or via an outsourced partner), to develop platform-specific creative, to build landers, to spin up post-click flows, to learn what works and to refine what doesn't. Those costs add drag to every marketing program.

The brands that win long-term don’t eliminate those costs - they lower them. They figure out how to reduce the unit cost of producing a winning ad, of shipping a high-performing experience, of the lessons learned along the way. Just as the investor who continually lowers his/her basis compounds wealth faster, the advertiser who lowers creative, lander, experience + learning costs compounds growth faster.

• Creative: Some brands spend $20k to $30k producing a handful of “hero” ads. Others produce dozens of variations at a fraction of the cost, increasing surface area for breakthroughs while lowering average cost per “hit” creative. Over time, the brand that can produce strong creative for half the unit cost builds a structural advantage: they spend less to make ads that perform better, which frees up more capital into those winning ads, which gives them the ability to create even more ads, and so on and so forth.
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• Experiences: Same story on the post-click side. Many brands build custom landing pages from scratch for every campaign. Smarter brands modularize. They create systems where new experiences can be deployed at 10% the cost and 10x the speed. That lowers the basis for every future campaign.
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• Learning: Finally, learning itself has a cost. Early dollars are the most expensive because you are still figuring out how the platform works, what account structures make sense, which audience(s) tend to perform best, what eccentricities (and there are always eccentricities) exist…all while calibrating messaging, offers, creatives, angles and landers. If you can reach confidence faster and cheaper, every future dollar compounds more efficiently.

Think of it like this:

• Brand A spends $100k in Q3 to generate three winning creatives, two high-performing experiences and the insights to scale.
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• Brand B spends $60k over the same period, and reaches the same point.

Both may scale successfully. But Brand B starts compounding from a lower basis, with $40k of capital ready to be redeployed into growth. Over quarters and years, that advantage snowballs.

I wrote about this dynamic in detail in The Creative Performance Metrics That Matter in 2025.

The key point is this: most marketers optimize at the surface with CPMs, CTRs and CPCs. But the real compounding advantage comes from lowering structural costs. The lower your basis in creative, in experiences and in learning, the higher your risk-adjusted returns over time.

Rule #6: Stay Emotionally Neutral

This one might be the hardest.

Emotions kill returns. Fear makes you sell at the bottom. Greed compels you to buy at the top.

But the deeper trap is resulting - a term coined by poker player Annie Duke’s for judging decisions only by their immediate outcomes. In poker, as in investing or advertising, a player can make the right decision, put the chips in with the odds in their favor and still lose to an unlucky draw. Luck cuts both ways - that same player can make a reckless call and get bailed out by the river. The outcome doesn’t prove the decision right or wrong.

The best investors stay even.

The same applies to advertising. Campaign performance can be incredible one day and horrific the next. Some days your ROAS will look like you’ve had a bank error in your favor or found the cheat code. Other days, you’ll wonder if your client’s business is still viable and offer up just about anything to the Google Gods for a sale.

We’ve all been there.

Good campaigns sometimes look terrible in the short term. Bad campaigns sometimes spike and look like winners. If you judge by next-day results, you’ll never know which is which.

Warren Buffett has warned shareholders of this exact trap. Berkshire Hathaway stock has fallen more than 50% three separate times. Did that make Berkshire a bad investment? Not at all. The fundamentals were intact, so he held. Holding is why Berkshire compounded into one of the greatest investments of all time.

I’ve seen this play out recently for a B2B SaaS client. Due to a series of weird factors (some leads cancelling multiple bookings, a few vacations, a prospect’s kid getting sick), their account looked like it produced nothing for 2+ weeks – no closed/won deals. Based on the top-line, it was bleak. But, as with the legal client above, the fundamentals were fine. The leads were good. The opportunities were real. Life just got in the way for several of those prospects all at the same time. We stayed the course, and by the end of the month, those deals had closed and the top-line performance matched the fundamentals.

That’s the point: emotional neutrality isn’t about ignoring performance. It’s about separating signal from noise. Buffett didn’t dump Berkshire when the stock price cratered (he actually bought more) – so don’t turn off a historically-good campaign because your Tuesday bled red.

The easy-to-say, hard-to-master secret is detachment. Don’t chase the ticker (or the CPA, or the ROAS, or whatever else); stay focused on the fundamentals.

The Point of Rules

Rules don’t exist to make things rigid. They exist to prevent you from doing something stupid.

Without rules, every budget decision feels like a debate. Debates are often won by emotions and loud voices, not logic, reason or math. With rules, every decision is filtered through a framework that already anticipates volatility, risk and human bias.

You don’t need to win every campaign. You just need a governing philosophy that minimizes the probability of disaster while allowing you to compound returns over time. That’s exactly what these rules do.

That’s where I’ll leave it for this first issue.

If you take anything away from the last ~5,000 words, I hope it’s this: everything is a capital allocation exercise - and the rules of advertising aren’t dissimilar from the rules of investing.

That’s why the best marketers borrow from the best investors.

The game isn’t about looking busy, it’s about compounding. It isn’t about spreading dollars evenly, it’s about putting them where they earn the highest return. And it isn’t about reacting to the day’s swings, it’s about staying consistent long enough for the math to work in your favor.

In next week’s issue, we’re going deeper. I’ll walk you through how to build a portfolio of ad spend the way a great investor builds a portfolio of assets: concentrating on winners, cutting losers without hesitation and sidestepping the survivorship traps that quietly kill performance. We’ll also cover the management rules that keep you compounding through volatility, plus the contrarian plays that separate disciplined allocators from everyone else.

If Part I tore down the bad habits and Part II reframed the rules, then Part III is where it all comes together.

I know that most marketers will never operate this way. But I also know that if you do, you’ll find yourself playing a completely different game.

Until next week,

Sam

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