Happy Sunday, Everyone! I spent most of this week in Boston (my least favorite sports city) at SMX Advanced. If you work in Paid Media or SEO & don’t attend…give it a try next year. It’s one of the better events around. One of the topics that was front-and-center - thanks largely to Google’s incessant push for adoption - is AI Max. In the last few months, AI Max has become the most-pushed campaign type by Google Reps - even the smaller accounts we manage are getting the the full-court press:...
16 days ago • 11 min read
Happy Sunday, Everyone! It’s difficult to believe, but the 5th month of 2026 is now in the rear-view mirror. Graduations (and my least favorite event - graduation parties) are scattered across my calendar like sprinkles on a sundae. Aside: if you’re the proud parent of a recent graduate, congratulations! This issue was the result of one member of my team asking why I started asking the same question in every client onboarding, audit and candidate interview: what’s the gross margin on the...
23 days ago • 12 min read
Happy Memorial Day Weekend, Everyone! This week’s issue began years ago as a passing thought I had, and (as things often do), evolved into one of the more useful frameworks I've stumbled into in a while. It's a different beast than the usual DD - there’s more math, it’s a bit less tactical & the implications stretch far beyond marketing to investing, hiring, brand-building, and the day-to-day decisions every exec makes. As a fair warning, this one is longer and more complex than usual (I’m...
about 1 month ago • 21 min read
Happy Sunday, Everyone! Last week's issue laid out a working framework for testing - the 10 questions every brand / page has to answer, paired with the 2 magnitudes at which any test can address them (10% or incremental; 10x or revolution). Multiply the two and you have a 20-cell matrix that every test can be classified into. That framework was, intentionally, a taxonomy. This week is where we put it to work. The first useful exercise this framework enables is a historical analysis of your...
about 1 month ago • 16 min read
Happy Sunday, Everyone! First, to all the moms out there: Happy Mother’s Day! Quick note before we get into it: this is the first of 2 issues on where most testing/CRO programs go wrong (this one) and what to do about it (next week’s). Over the last decade, I’ve worked on hundreds of CRO projects and alongside dozens of consultants/agencies. Across those experiences, I started to notice a pattern – the brands/agencies that reaped massive rewards from their testing program approached it...
about 1 month ago • 25 min read
Happy Sunday, Everyone! Last week, I made the case that AI raised the floor on mediocrity rather than the ceiling on excellence: that adequacy is now free, which makes it worthless as a competitive position. Then this week's news cycle did its level best to test the thesis: Meta launched its official Ads AI Connectors (an MCP server and a CLI, both in open beta) that let advertisers run Meta campaigns from inside ChatGPT, Claude or any MCP-compatible agent. This change came on the heels of a...
about 2 months ago • 13 min read
Happy Sunday, Everyone! We're a third of the way through 2026, and the pace of change has not slowed. If anything, it's accelerating - which is exactly the topic of this week's issue. Last week, I wrote about creative being math wearing a costume - that the ad itself is just the visible shadow of the work that actually matters. This week I want to zoom out one level. The dynamic playing out in creative is playing out across every market AI has touched, and most marketers/brands/operators are...
about 2 months ago • 6 min read
Happy Sunday, Everyone! I hope you're all having a great weekend - enjoying the weather, squeezing in some time outside, and maybe (if you're lucky) avoiding the inbox for a few hours. Spring is in full swing here in Baltimore, which means my Sunday afternoons are being slowly reclaimed by yard work, Orioles games, and the annual ritual of figuring out how the grill stopped working over the winter. This week, I want to tie together a lot of what I've written about individually - hit rate,...
2 months ago • 8 min read
Happy Sunday, Everyone! I hope you’re all enjoying the April sun. The past few weeks have been wildly busy, between launching ChatGPT ads for some clients, to growing the team, to getting ready for a few weeks of conferences. In the midst of all that, I had a conversation with a prospect experiencing a significant amount of fraud in their account, which got me thinking about a similar situation I had years ago, and the non-intuitive result that changed how I think about fraud altogether. This...
2 months ago • 10 min read