Field notes

AI has dramatically lowered the cost of producing convincing work. That changes what founders and CMOs should actually test when choosing an agency or growth partner.

How Google and Meta are quietly reducing advertiser control - and why it matters. Sitting across from an ad manager. Campaign results in front of us. Leads coming in. No deals closed. I suggest a change in configuration. He looks at me calmly and says: "But this is how we were taught on the Google training." He is not lying. He was genuinely taught this way.

When a founder tells me their customer acquisition costs are climbing, the first question I ask is not about the campaigns. It is about who they are acquiring. Most companies optimise for conversion. The platform rewards conversion. The agency reports conversion. Everyone is aligned around the same metric. The problem is that conversion and value are not the same thing.

At a conference in Miami last month, the director of e-commerce strategy at Nestlé said something that should have made headlines. She said that marketers have been trying to measure incrementality for decades. And there just aren't great solutions.

Goods exist. Customers exist. Local trade functions. The difficulty begins when the parties do not know each other. In many regions of the world, transaction costs fall with distance. Here, they rise with anonymity.