Happy 4th Weekend, Everyone! I hope you’re all enjoying the first weekend of the back-half of 2026! I hope you had a wonderful, fun, relaxing 4th of July. I spent this past week in Houston for the World Cup - and while I’m not a huge soccer/football fan, this was truly something else. I watched Brazil-Japan, and the entire stadium was jam-packed in yellow, green, red, white & blue. The energy in and around the entire city was unlike anything else - it was contagious. Standing in that crowd,...
16 days ago • 6 min read
Happy Sunday, Everyone! It’s hard to believe, but this is the final issue of the first half of 2026. We are (almost) officially closer to 2027 than we are to 2025…which makes sense, because Christmas feels like a lifetime ago (or maybe that’s just me). This week’s issue came out of a client conversation I had on Monday - I was talking to an incredibly smart, well-read CMO who said (paraphrasing): I’ve read thousands of pages on AI stuff. I know it’s important. I hear from our customers that...
23 days ago • 14 min read
Happy Sunday, Everyone! We recently audited a brand in the healthcare space that, by any outside assessment, should have been crushing it. They are the undisputed heavyweight kings in their space. They’ve completed more complex procedures for this niche issue than any other provider out there. They’ve changed (at least) 20,000 lives. They’ve received ~3,200 5* reviews. Every industry award there is to win, they’ve won it (usually at least twice). The face of the brand is charismatic and...
about 1 month ago • 19 min read
Happy Sunday, Everyone! I trust you're all doing well, enjoying the final few days before summer is officially here (at least, in the northern hemisphere). After what felt like forever (those April showers extended firmly into May here, so it’s nice to get real, true, “June” weather), things have finally picked up - which means our audit pipeline is jam-packed with brands that either (i) feel they're off-track toward their 2026 goals or (ii) are trying to get a better handle on what's working...
about 1 month ago • 13 min read
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:...
about 1 month 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...
about 2 months 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 2 months 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...
2 months 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...
2 months ago • 25 min read