News & Perspectives
What we are reading, and what we make of it
Research summaries and arguments, in roughly equal measure. Every figure names its source and links to it, so you can disagree with the reading rather than the arithmetic.
- Research
Commerce media is growing up, which means it is slowing down
Retail media passes $200 billion globally in 2026. The interesting number is not the total; it is what the growth rate does once you take Amazon out of it.
- Research
Where the growth actually was in 2025
US digital advertising reached $294.6 billion, up 13.9%, in a year with no Olympics, no World Cup and no election. Underneath the total, the mix moved sharply.
- Perspective
Performance is not a channel. It is a standard of proof.
The word got attached to a set of formats and lost its meaning. Reclaiming it is mostly about being willing to be wrong in public.
- Perspective
The creator line item grew up faster than the process around it
$37 billion in 2025, $44 billion forecast for 2026. Most of it is still being bought on instinct, briefed over direct messages and measured on screenshots.
- Perspective
Measurement after signal loss: three instruments, not one dashboard
Attribution stopped being able to carry the weight put on it. What replaces it is not a better platform; it is the discipline of using the right instrument for the right question.
- Research
Search grew 11% in a market that grew 13.9%
For the largest line item in digital advertising, growing slower than the market is not a rounding error. It is the story of the year.
- Perspective
How to run a geo holdout that anyone will believe
The method is not difficult. What makes it fail is almost always a decision taken before the test started.
- Perspective
First-party data, minus the theatre
Most first-party data programmes produce a diagram, a vendor contract and a segment list nobody uses. Here is the short version of what actually matters.
- Perspective
What generative production actually changes, and what it does not
The cost of making an asset fell by an order of magnitude. Almost nothing else in the pipeline did, which is why most teams are not feeling the benefit.
- Perspective
Connected TV is not television, and buying it like television is expensive
It looks like TV, it is sold by people who used to sell TV, and it behaves like programmatic display with a very large screen attached.
- Perspective
The incentive problem nobody in this industry wants to discuss
An agency paid a percentage of your media spend has an arithmetic reason not to find out that some of it is unnecessary. This is not cynicism; it is structure.
- Perspective
Mix modelling came back, and it is not what you remember
The technique everyone retired in 2012 is now the most durable instrument in the toolkit. It is also routinely oversold.
- Perspective
The brand and performance split is an accounting artefact
Two budgets, two teams, two standards of evidence, and one customer who experiences none of it.
- Perspective
The stop doing list, and why it pays for the engagement
The most valuable deliverable in most marketing engagements is a short list of things to switch off. It is also the one nobody asks for.
- Perspective
Where agentic systems actually help in a media operation
Not the strategy, and not the creative judgement. The parts of the week that a competent analyst resents doing.