Most acquisition programs optimize for one number: Customer Acquisition Cost (CAC). That’s a problem. A “cheap” customer isn’t necessarily a good customer. If they churn at a high rate, spend little, or cost more to service than they generate, low CAC can quietly destroy business value. Yet many dashboards still celebrate volume + efficiency: ✔️ Lower CAC ✔️ More conversions ✔️ Higher click-through rates …but say nothing about customer quality . Two customers acquired at the

Why Planners Must Understand Single-Period vs Multi-Period Optimization A long-established principle in marketing science is that advertising works over time—not just in the moment it appears. Work as foundational as that of Simon Broadbent’s have been educating us about this since the 70s. (The 4 th edition of Spending Advertising Money by Simon and Brian Jacobs (1984) covers this research and its impact on media decision-making at the time.) An impression served today ra

In over 20 years of helping brands measure and improve their advertising impact, we’ve found a striking pattern: nearly every brand we’ve...

Credit: The Athletic, Jul 15, 2025 On July 12, Amanda Anisimova stepped onto the largest stage in women’s tennis; one rung from its...

There’s a wave of social posts lately touting the ROI of one media channel over another. You’ve seen them: “Channel X delivers an ROI of...

Image credit: ChatGPT There is a class of marketer whose business model gives them a distinct advantage. The group includes banks,...

Image credit: ChatGPT The March 2025 SpencerStuart CMO Tenure Study ( https://www.spencerstuart.com/research-and-insight/cmo-tenure-study...

The annual budget setting exercise is a rite of passage for every marketer once they become responsible for a budget, in most companies....

At least, don’t model churn as your only step. A very common approach to churn reduction is to build predictive models which are intended...

Every year the same ritual plays out in so many companies: Marketing submits its budget requests for the coming fiscal; Finance pokes...

It’s incremental lift : the sales your company generates every year due to all forms of marketing communications. Or put another way, the...

The marketing director approached me after I had presented our work in multi-channel ad effect measurement at a large telco. I had not...

Robert Jones, like many of us, trusted his car’s sat-nav system to help guide him to his destination. But on one unfortunate day, it...

Andre Agassi is a former world #1 ranked tennis player and one of only 5 men to achieve the Career Grand Slam. As great a player as he...

I was happy to appear on the latest WARC podcast, talking digital ad fraud and marketing effectiveness. We discussed why it is hard to...

The near term outlook for the economy is bleak in the US, the UK, and Canada. The recession headwinds are strong and there is much debate...

As we saw in our last blog post, bots are eating digital ad budgets to an unacceptable degree. Let’s do something about it. We have...

The digital ad display market has been plagued with issues, but it should still be an important channel for all marketers, both to build...

"I don't like associating with liars, either as brands or as people. I think we've forgotten that. I think society as a whole is...

Andy Brown sees 'what happened' as the future 'What happened' will become more important to advertisers relative to 'how many people'...