Ditch the Dirty Blanket: Facing the Funky Truth of Ad Spend

Look, marketing land is littered with marketers clinging to old-school attribution models tighter than a toddler with a filthy stuffed bunny. In a world where everyone’s pretending their last click attribution model is the Holy Grail—and not some rickety relic stinking of stale Cheetos—one duo is here to yank the security blanket out of your sweaty little fists. On one side, there’s a guy hosting the discussion in a neck brace, “because nothing says resilience like debating ad tech with limited mobility.” That’s from the transcript, not some fever dream. 

On the other side, a CEO who spells “Incremental” as if vowels were an optional in-app purchase. Together, they’re ripping the Band-Aid off deterministic attribution and exposing it as that funky-smelling blanket you’ve been lugging around for way too long.

“Markers do treat deterministic attribution like their childhood security blanket, even when it’s frayed and full of holes,” says Pesach Lattin. Try explaining that to the crowd still insisting that the last click is the best thing since shakshuka. He even relates it to Hebrew, pointing out how “Hebrew does kind of have vowels, as Nikudot,” but mostly you’ve got to guess them. 

Incremental’s weird vowel-hating name is the perfect metaphor for marketers who guess at results rather than face reality.

What’s at stake? Well, “if you’re a marketer and you’ve been getting your bonuses based on performance and suddenly someone shows you that the performance actually isn’t there… do you really want to know?”

 That’s Maor Sadra calling out the emperor’s new clothes—except the emperor here might be a CMO working on borrowed credibility. He drops a reference to Apple “breaking things” just enough to nudge marketers into a new era without being too nice about it. Meanwhile, Google’s still sipping sangria on the beach, not quite breaking enough to force the marketing world to face the music. “Yeah,” Sadra adds, “Google hasn’t broken everything yet.”

They talk “incrementality,” a term that sounds like an academic sneeze but is actually about testing what changes in marketing actually move the sales needle—without deluding yourself into thinking one click caused the heavens to part and the cash registers to sing. As Sadra puts it, “Incrementality was like you turn on advertising, turn off advertising, spot the difference. It wasn’t rocket science.” How’s that for rubbing salt in the wound? You got fooled by deterministic attribution when a simple on-off test could have told you the truth.

Speaking of truths, AI is tossed into the blender. Is it a scalpel, a sledgehammer, or a glittery rock? According to Sadra, it’s “All the above,” and that’s not even a cop-out—he means it literally. Today’s AI can turn a company’s valuation into a rocket ship (see: up lovin’s stock price), make lazy marketers lazier, or just get sprinkled around like confetti to dazzle the easily impressed. Meanwhile, VR and AR continue their existential crisis. Sadra’s not out to kill them—he admits he wants Vision Pro or something similar to be the future—but let’s be honest, those bulky headsets are about as graceful as a hippo in stilettos. And if Apple’s making progress, it’s still baby steps. On the other hand, he notes that we can all have full conversations with generative AI and basically forget we’re talking to a machine. Congratulations, humanity, we’ve anthropomorphized the algorithms.

Then there’s the big existential question: is marketing a lavish casino where everyone’s losing more than they win? Spoiler: yes. Sadra recalls the Uber fiasco, where cutting 80% of ad spend changed nothing. Imagine the horror: an entire marketing stack exposed as a glorified bonfire. “I was the last one laughing,” Sadra says, after refusing to sign an absurd insertion order that others eagerly took. That’s not just tea spilled—that’s a tsunami of truth drowning the gullible.

So why does this happen? Why do marketers throw good money at bad campaigns? “Wasting ad spend is inherent part of the model,” Sadra explains, basically calling the industry a glorious, accepted mess. Without a certain amount of waste, the whole economy might implode. “If our world becomes 100% efficient tomorrow, the global economy will collapse,” he says. So guess what, inefficiency is the glue holding this insane puzzle together. Maybe stop crying over spilled impressions and start owning the reality that perfect efficiency would kill us all.

Ethics, that old chestnut, comes up too. Are marketers basically sleazy spies tracking your every move? Well, yeah, kind of. Sadra’s refreshingly blunt: “If I’m willing to use your service, then you get to use my data and monetize me and show me better ads. I’m fine with that.” It’s the devil’s bargain we’ve all made with “free” services. The user complains about creepy surveillance, but nobody wants to pay for email or cat videos.

 We’ve sold our souls for convenience, and here we are. Regulators waltz in, trying to fix things, but end up aiding the big platforms. Sadra shrugs at privacy paranoia, basically saying, “No one’s spying on you maliciously; we just want to drive relevant ads.” Maybe he’s drinking the Kool-Aid, or maybe he’s just telling it like it is.

If you think the solution to marketing’s ethical swamp is contextual targeting, guess again. Sadra suggests the future is first-party data and AI-powered decision-making. Let the machines handle the impossible complexity. Humans can’t juggle trillions of impressions any more than they can lick their own elbows. The marketing professional of the future might just set budget caps, upload creative, and watch the machine do the heavy lifting. “It’s not humanly possible,” he says. “It’s all going to be automated.”

As for VR and AR, he’s not trashing them. He simply doesn’t think they’ve arrived. It’s like putting on a fancy costume before you learn to walk: great idea for later, but let’s not pretend it’s the present. He’d love to see AR interfaces everywhere, screens turned into personal billboards that recognize you like an old friend. Privacy fans just fainted at the suggestion, but it’s coming, at least if we trust our weird tech destiny.

On a desert island scenario (because why not?), Sadra mentions he’d bring his co-founder and maybe even drag Elon Musk along. “If I had to bring someone else from the ad world,” he muses, “Scott Galloway,” or maybe Terry from Luma. Just picture these folks trying to negotiate incremental coconuts as currency. The bigger point: strip away fancy dashboards and industrial-scale data, and it all comes down to storytelling and survival. A-B testing and scenario planning are great, but try doing that without Wi-Fi. Suddenly, marketing becomes what it always was: trying not to starve and convincing someone to share their limited resources.

The journey that led these people here wasn’t always glamorous. Sadra started as a cleaner at an ad tech company—yes, a janitor—who impressed his future boss by never taking a sick day, and that hustle got him a ticket into the industry. It’s a rags-to-riches trajectory that reminds everyone that hard work can pay off, even if the industry is a carnival game rigged with smoke and mirrors.

So how do we leave this carnival? Maybe we don’t. Maybe we just accept that incrementality is the new religion and pray that AI gets better at telling us which half of our budget is wasted. Or we learn to love the chaos, knowing that if we ever did achieve perfect efficiency, we’d wipe out the entire advertising ecosystem and cause an economic apocalypse. Marketers might embrace privacy as a selling point, or maybe they’ll shrug and say, “Hey, you like free stuff, right?” It’s the trade-off we’ve made. Nothing personal, just business.

In the end, if you’re clinging to deterministic attribution as if it’s the Dead Sea Scrolls, it’s time to shake loose. You’re as stuck in the past as someone bragging about their dial-up modem. The future is about testing, learning, and acknowledging that success doesn’t come from one magical click but a series of nudges and a willingness to confront uncomfortable truths. The real superpower marketers should crave isn’t time travel or mind-reading; it’s the ability to admit they’ve been wrong and fix it before the CFO throws them overboard.

Stay Bold, Stay Curious, and Know More than You Did Yesterday

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