Hello, World!

A friend once told me:

If you can't make someone understand something, it isn't that they're slow. It's that you don't actually understand it.

This blog is me checking that I do, and working through the questions with anyone who's wrestled with the same ones.

The topics are both wide and narrow. Martech generally, mobile advertising and attribution and measurement, personalization and customer value management, marketing science and causal inference, and the AI agents now pushing in from both sides of every ad. My own slant will be all over it. Isn't that what blogging is for.

I'll also pull from academic research. Papers usually aren't readable, because the author has to spend most of the paper defending against every possible counterargument to get into a top journal. The underlying ideas usually aren't that hard. I'll pick the interesting parts from marketing, computer science, and psychology journals and share them here. Sometimes I'll also share conversations I've had with people inside the industry and academia, and if any of them say yes, you'll see their writing here directly.

One promise. I'll keep it as simple as I can. Even so, if something doesn't read simply, that's not you missing something. That's me missing something. Sorry in advance.

I'll also try to write without needing a math background. Math, to me, is like the instructions that come with an IKEA chair: useful while you're assembling, not needed to sit on it, and sometimes not even needed to put it together. So I'll mostly leave the math out, and for the readers who want it, I'll tuck small equations into asides you can skip. Not knowing math is not the problem. If I can't explain something without it, that's my problem, not yours.

I'll aim for weekly, though with a day job to feed, I can't always promise it. No AI writes these either, only a final polish at the end, so each one takes a while. Honestly, if a model was writing it, I'd have no reason to run this blog at all.

Sharing opinions means some of what I write will be contested. If you end up disagreeing with me, I'm sorry in advance. I'm writing from a small corner of the industry, with a limited view, and I still have a long way to go. Chances are good you're right.