Sat in a Q1 results review on Tuesday where a slide claimed branded search returned fourteen dollars for every one. Everyone nodded. Someone said the word efficient twice. I asked what that number would look like if we switched the channel off in one mid-sized market for six weeks, and the room developed a sudden, urgent interest in the coffee situation.
Nobody wants to run that test. Nobody has ever wanted to run that test.
Branded search is people typing your name into a box. They already had the name. Something put it there, and it was not the ad they clicked on the way to a checkout they were already walking toward.
Attribution measures proximity to the sale, not responsibility for it, and every year we move more money toward whatever happens to be standing nearest the door.
Here's the part that gets lost. The last-click model is not wrong so much as incurious. It answers a question about sequence and gets read as an answer about cause. A retargeting ad served to a person who already has a full cart is not persuasion, it is a receipt with a media cost attached.
Incrementality asks the harder version of the question. What would have happened anyway? You get at it with holdouts, geo tests, matched markets, all the unglamorous work that requires deliberately not spending money in Spokane for a while so you can learn something true. It is slow. It makes people nervous. It is also the only measurement that survives contact with reality.
Meanwhile brand keeps losing this argument while winning it. The evidence is not subtle. Patagonia, Liquid Death, and Duolingo did not buy their way into your head one click at a time. They built something recognizable and then let the performance channels harvest it. The harvest gets the credit. The planting gets cut in Q3.
So a modest ask for the next review. Before you defend the brand line with adjectives, run one holdout. One market, six weeks, one channel dark. Come back with a number instead of a philosophy. Finance does not distrust brand, it distrusts arguments that cannot be falsified, and honestly, it is right about that.
A retargeting ad served to a person who already has a full cart is not persuasion, it is a receipt with a media cost attached.
Explained the holdout plan to Truffles when I got home, because the meeting had left me talking to whoever was available. She listened from the top of the bookshelf, established that I was not food, and left. Barnaby never looked up. The only incrementality test I run at home is whether either of them comes when called, and the answer, reliably, every single night, is that they were coming anyway.