"Half the money I spend on advertising is wasted; the trouble is, I don't know which half."

Knowing the context of his work, my view of the infamous quote attributed to John Wanamaker is that advertising measurement is fundamentally and necessarily uncertain, even in success. This surfaces another, in my view, invalid interpretation of the quote: that advertising is only effective when it can be measured perfectly, absolutely, and with total precision. To my mind, this has been the prevailing view within digital advertising sector: that advertising measurement is inherently defined by total, deterministic precision.

This is the measurement myth.

In this podcast, I’ll unpack the measurement myth and why I believe the digital advertising ecosystem is abandoning it in favor of more holistic, statistically sophisticated, and scalable approaches to advertising attribution and measurement. I’ll discuss some of the methodologies at the frontier of advertising attribution that are alleviating the need for deterministic identity in advertising measurement and how their use allows advertisers to materially expand the reach of their messaging, and what the implications of that are for the digital economy.

Resources referenced / cited in this podcast:

• CapitalOne Mobile e-Commerce Statistics
• Sensor Tower 5 Year Market Forecast
• IAB 2025 Outlook Study
• Meta’s Renaissance
• Everything is an ad network
• Netflix and Disney+ advertising, two years in
• Flying blind
• Last-click attribution, deterministic measurement, and Wittgenstein’s ruler
• A Comprehensive Guide to Bayesian Marketing Mix Modeling
• Podcast: Understanding Interoperable Private Attribution (with Ben Savage)
• What is Federated Learning in digital advertising?

Thanks to the sponsors of this week’s episode of the Mobile Dev Memo podcast:

• Vibe. Vibe is the leading Streaming TV ad platform for small and medium-sized businesses looking for actionable advertising campaign performance.
• INCRMNTAL⁠⁠. True attribution measures incrementality, always on.

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