A line of inquiry
Demand & Paid Media
Buying attention accountably, when you need customers this quarter.
When you need demand now rather than next year, paid media is the lever you can pull today. This line covers the honest economics of paid reach: incrementality over vanity metrics, what a budget actually buys once the spend is separated from the fee, and how to read the result without the one flattering platform number.
19 pieces in this line, across 13 threads.
Thread
The measurement crisis
Attribution Windows and the Illusion of the Last Click: A Synthesis
Last-click attribution, multi-touch models, and data-driven attribution all describe how observed credit is split. None of them measure whether the advertising caused the sale. The field-experiment literature is what tells them apart.
Read · 11 minGeo-Experiments: The Randomized Controlled Trial for Local Advertising
Geo experiments randomize whole regions into ad and no-ad conditions to measure what advertising actually caused. The method, the evidence behind it, and why a local business can run one without individual tracking or a data-science team.
Read · 10 minMarketing Efficiency Ratio: A Defense of the Blunt Metric
Channel-level ROAS can be gamed by moving attribution credit between channels. The marketing efficiency ratio cannot, because it captures halo and cross-channel effects by construction. Why a blunt, blended number resists that gaming, and where it still falls short.
Read · 10 minThe Incrementality Gap: What a Decade of Field Experiments Says About Paid Search ROI
Three peer-reviewed field experiments, and the industry figures that echo them, converge on one finding: much of the return platforms report on paid search is not causally incremental to the advertiser. What the evidence says, and where it stops.
Read · 11 minThread
The mechanics of the ad auction
VCG vs. GSP: The Auction Mechanism the Ad Industry Didn't Choose, and Why
The truthful auction economists prize, Vickrey-Clarke-Groves, lost to a simpler, higher-revenue design, the generalized second-price auction. A case study in mechanism-design tradeoffs, and what it means for how paid media is actually run.
Read · 9 minWhy the Generalized Second-Price Auction Isn't Truthful (and What It Means for Your Google Ads Bidding Strategy)
The auction that sets your cost per click was proven, in peer-reviewed economics, to have no honest optimal bid. What that means for how a paid budget should actually be run, read from the primary sources.
Read · 10 minThread
The new paid surfaces
Retail Media's Concentration Problem: What $196 Billion in Ad Spend Reveals About Platform Power
Retail media has grown into one of the largest categories in digital advertising, yet almost all of its new money flows to two platforms. The evidence for the concentration, why the auction mechanism makes it durable, and what it means for a smaller advertiser.
Read · 10 minThe Third Auction: How ChatGPT Ads Repeat and Break the Sponsored-Search Playbook
ChatGPT ads arrived in 2026 wearing a new face, a sponsored line inside a written answer. Most of the machinery underneath is borrowed from twenty years of keyword auctions. What it inherits, what it genuinely breaks with, and how to read a fast-moving surface without overclaiming.
Read · 10 minThread
The post-cookie measurement stack
Consent Mode v2 and the New Grammar of Consented Measurement
A rule written for European traffic has quietly become the default contract for measuring paid media everywhere. What Consent Mode v2 requires, why it now shapes tracking for businesses with no European customers at all, and how to read it as infrastructure rather than a compliance chore.
Read · 10 minConsent, Cookies, and Commerce: Building a Measurement Stack That Survives the Next Platform Reversal
The plan to replace the third-party cookie was built for six years and then cancelled, while the cookie itself stayed. That reversal is the real lesson: platform privacy policy is not a stable thing to build on. A cookieless measurement stack that owns its first-party data, signals consent, and transmits events server-side is the durable answer, and the evidence for why is stronger than the hype.
Read · 11 minThread
Allocating a paid budget under uncertainty
Thread
Auction economics of local demand
Thread
How India's Local Businesses Get Found
Thread
Incrementality and causal measurement
Thread
Measurement at small budgets
Thread
Post-cookie measurement infrastructure
Thread
Privacy volatility and durable measurement
Thread
The economics of the ad auction
Original research
Studies from this line of inquiry
Small Budget, Big Platform: How Automated Bidding Treats Low-Spend SMB Ad Accounts
Google's own reliability floor sits at 30 to 50 conversions a month, and the clearest large-sample data available says a lot of small ad accounts sit right at the edge of it, though not for the reason most owners assume.
30 to 50 conversions Google's own stated floor before Smart Bidding or Target CPA results should be trusted Read the study · 9 min ResearchThe ROAS Illusion: Why Your Ad Platform's Return Number Isn't the Real One
Independent incrementality research shows platform-reported ROAS is structurally unreliable, not in the single direction most marketers assume.
5x to 10x Reported inflation of branded search and retargeting ROAS versus measured incremental return Read the study · 11 min ResearchThe Zero-Click Tax: What AI-Answer Erosion Is Really Adding to the Cost of a Paid Lead
AI Overviews are cutting click-through by roughly a third to two-thirds on the queries they touch, yet the broadest cost-per-lead data available shows costs are not rising in lockstep, which means the real tax lands unevenly, on whoever isn't cited.
68.01% of US Google searches ended without a click, Jan-Apr 2026, up from 60.45% in 2024 Read the study · 11 minKeep reading
The other lines of inquiry
The Macro Shift
The once-in-a-generation change in how people find a business.
The Attention Landscape
Where a market’s attention actually sits, and how it keeps moving.
Discovery Science
How buyers find a business now, across search and AI answers.
Choice Science
Why a buyer picks one business over another once both are found.
Conversion Science
Turning a visit you already earned into a booked customer.
AI Operations
Putting the routine work of a business on evaluated AI systems.
Vertical Playbooks
How each kind of business gets found and chosen, on its own terms.
MSME & Global Commerce
The economics of the small and mid-size business online.
Trust, Ethics & Regulation
The line between persuasion and manipulation, and the rules that hold it.
Measurement & Honesty
Measuring visibility truthfully, and refusing the numbers that lie.
See where you stand in your own market.
A specialist-reviewed read of your visibility across search and AI answers, for your business and your market. No guaranteed number, and no obligation.