Disclaimer: I’m not a marketing guy. It’s sold as hand wavy. I once dropped in on a consulting client (at the request of an investor on the board) and did a qu

Disclaimer: I’m not a marketing guy. It’s sold as hand wavy. I once dropped in on a consulting client (at the request of an investor on the board) and did a quick assessment. The assessment was holistic and marketing was one of many enterprise value levers, so did a rough check. The marketing firm, very similar to the Uber commentary in the underlying podcast above where he found 20,000 installs coming from an app with 30,000 MAUs, I calculated claimed performance which back of the envelope would imply you could capture the entire US vertical for that industry for sub $X0M of annual spend. I knew that space very well, and well that just was not possible. My quick question kicked off a large tap dance in which some finger pointing occurred and a “new attribution formula” was introduced. The vendor got fired. This was sort of a reasonably sized entity, with some sophistication. But think about it, unless you’re tech native, your VP of marketing has no granular data abilities in 2020, and unless you have a pool of SQL capable analysts lying around, AND you’re going to insist to validate on your own, it simply doesn’t work. So you trust the vendor. But wait the vendor gets paid X% of what you spend. Hmmm, would they realllllly work super hard to make sure the results are real if they are not easily found out to be falsified? This is a paranoid stance, obviously. But intrinsically structurally flawed. The Uber guy on the podcast straight up said he wouldn’t buy a dollar of programmatic ads without a big data team internally and a policy of (loosely quoted) “we need that file to check and if you don’t send it to us we’re cutting you off”. That’s just a lot of work.