Essays on paid social creative, brand growth and the economics of the feed, written to be argued with.
The scoreboard: attention, watch time, completion and high-intent engagement. Why “low attention channel” is a story the industry tells itself.
Strategy, production and optimisation as one continuous loop, and why neither a hero campaign nor a mountain of content can do its job.
Auction pricing, algorithmic feeds, skippable formats and the polish penalty. The campaign model wasn’t wrong, its assumptions expired.
On auction-priced media, creative quality sets your CPM. The working versus non-working split collapsed, and budgets haven’t caught up.
Platforms match creatives to people, so what’s in the frame decides who sees the ad. Diverse creative is diverse targeting.
Pre-launch research predicts, post-launch data knows. What changes when the portfolio faces real decisions every week: pause, remix, replace.
A reported frequency of six built on two-second skips is an effective frequency near zero. Manage attentive frequency instead.
Growth comes from people who barely know you, and they aren’t in your followers or your retargeting pool. Paid reach is the only door.
Follower reach is mostly phantom, so brands pay for the audience, then pay again to reach it. The $32 versus $21 CPM maths, worked honestly.
Warm audiences convert because the demand already existed. Harvesting it isn’t growth, and the dashboard can’t tell the difference.
Our position on synthetic creative runs on evidence, not conviction. The four conditions we track, and what changes when they move.