Marketing has never been more measurable. It may also have never been more short-term.

If measurement was supposed to solve marketing's credibility problem, why hasn't five years of better data increased CEO confidence in marketing?

In this Sharp Cut, Marc and Vassilis unpack what happens when the things marketing can observe quietly become the things organizations value.

They trace the progression from visibility → accountability → optimization → observability, and ask whether attribution windows, platform dashboards and ROI have inadvertently trained marketers to optimize for short-term outcomes.

Using research from Boathouse, the Norwegian marketing industry and others, they explore why the same data can produce radically different conclusions depending on how it is framed.

They also tackle a harder question: who is responsible?

Is finance forcing marketing to think short-term? Or have marketers quietly accepted the measurement windows handed to them by platforms and brought those definitions of effectiveness into the boardroom?

The answer turns measurement into something much bigger: a leadership decision.

Because the moment you choose the window, you decide what value counts — and what value doesn't.

Chapters:

00:00 Marketing Has Never Been More Measurable

00:50 More Measurement, Same Confidence

02:14 Marketing Won the Seat but Lost the Argument

03:49 How Measurement Became Optimization

05:13 When What We Can Observe Becomes What Counts

05:30 The Fishing Net Problem

06:47 Where Leadership Enters the Measurement Debate

08:38 Are Marketers Responsible?

09:12 When Marketing Takes Credit for the Weather

11:16 The 35 Forces That Affect ROI

12:09 The Halo Effect

13:30 Same Data, Two Completely Different Answers

15:45 The Retail Number That Changes the Story

16:26 Why Every Channel Wants More Budget

17:57 Measuring Podcast Advertising With the Wrong Net

20:07 The Problem With the 95:5 Rule

21:46 Why ROI Can Mislead

24:06 How Cutting Spend Can Improve ROI

25:20 What Does “Return” Actually Mean?

27:03 When Long-Term Evidence Loses to the Quarter

28:23 Can Marketing Choose a Different Window?

31:29 Measurement Becomes a Leadership Problem

32:42 You Can Predict the Answer by Looking at the Net

34:07 Five Questions to Ask Before Measuring

35:00 What Marketing Can Learn From Finance

35:35 The Measurement Problem Is a Leadership Problem

35:59 What Comes Next: Discounted Cash Flow

Episode Sources:

Boathouse, Fifth Annual CEO Study on Marketing and the CMO, 150 US CEOs, fielded January 2026. Coverage via Marketing Dive, SmartBrief, CommPRO.

Gartner, May 2024, CMO survey on internal skepticism of marketing value.

Calgary Marketing Association and Stone-Olafson, 2024 ROI report, Alberta marketers, n=124.

Kapero, ANFO and the Norwegian Media Businesses’ Association, The Commercial Power of Brands in the Digital World, 13 Norwegian companies, 2024 data.

Podscribe, Conversion Rate by Podcast Player, more than 50 direct response brands, 30 daywindow.

Quatical, The 35 Factors That Affect Marketing ROI.

Rosenzweig, P. (2007). The Halo Effect. Free Press.

Eddington, A. S. (1939). The Philosophy of Physical Science. Cambridge University Press. The ichthyologist parable, told in summary. No direct quotation used.

Are marketers getting better at measuring activity while getting worse at understanding value?

In this edition of The Barber’s Brief, Vassilis and Marc unpack four marketing debates that caught their attention.

First, the agency industry's truth-in-pricing problem: agencies teach clients to build premium brands while continuing to sell their own expertise through hours and headcount. As AI changes how quickly work gets done, what should clients actually be paying agencies for?

Then, a provocative challenge to Byron Sharp and the Ehrenberg-Bass school of thought: if mental and physical availability are table stakes, what actually allows a brand to break away from the competition and win?

The conversation then turns to attribution vs. incrementality, and why creators, affiliates and reviews can appear to generate revenue without necessarily creating incremental demand.

Finally, we explore pricing power and the idea that the biggest danger isn't failing to become a premium brand. It's losing the ability to set your own price.

And for Ad of the Week, Spotify shows how data, culture and great outdoor creative can create personalization at scale without needing to personalize advertising to individuals.

In this episode:

• Why agency pricing may be fundamentally broken
• What AI means for the billable-hour model
• Mental and physical availability vs. competitive strategy
• Roger Martin's “Where to Play / How to Win”
• Attribution vs. incrementality
• The changing role of creator and review content
• Why pricing power is really permission
• Spotify's hyperlocal OOH campaign
• Why creative can be the targeting mechanism

Chapters:

00:00 Welcome to the Barber’s Brief

01:23 The Marketing Industry’s Truth-in-Pricing Problem

03:36 What Should Clients Actually Pay Agencies For?

06:54 Why the Agency Model Is So Difficult to Change

09:14 Will AI Actually Reduce Agency Costs?

11:04 The Mental & Physical Availability Trap

14:52 What Actually Helps a Brand Win?

16:06 Breaking Out When Every Competitor Plays the Same Game

18:58 Attribution vs. Incrementality in Creator Marketing

21:18 How Creator Content Changes Value Over Time

22:49 Do We Have Too Much Attribution Data?

24:23 Pricing Power: Permission, Not Intent

28:20 Have Discounts Trained Consumers to Wait?

31:28 Ad of the Week: Spotify’s Hyperlocal Playlists

33:56 Why Spotify Gets Personalization Right

35:41 What’s Coming Next

37:12 Stay Sharp

Links:

The marketing industry's truth-in-pricing problem (and why adland is to blame)

Link: https://www.mediaweek.com.au/marketing-industry-truth-in-pricing-problem

Off Kilter 232: The Availability Trap.

Link: https://offkilter.substack.com/p/off-kilter-232-the-availability-trap

How to measure the true value of creators and review content

Link: https://searchengineland.com/value-creators-review-content-485028

Pricing Power

Link: https://www.linkedin.com/posts/mary-kyriakidi-4a5a4a57_when-i-talk-about-pricing-power-the-question-share-7496127277890568192-nzTS/

Ad of the Week - Spotify

Spotify turns playlist names into hyper-local punchlines

Link: https://www.thedrum.com/news/ad-of-the-day-spotify-turns-playlist-names-into-hyper-local-punchlines

AI is going to take our jobs. AI will commoditize creativity. AI will make strategy worse.

But AI isn't making those decisions. We are.

In this PostPod, Marc and V reflect on their conversation with Pats McDonald, Chief Strategy Officer at dentsu, and explore one of the most important ideas emerging from the AI conversation: human agency still matters.

They discuss why AI may eliminate barriers without eliminating expertise, how LLMs naturally pull marketers toward the average, the danger of settling for “strategy-ish,” and why faster answers don't necessarily produce better thinking.

The conversation also explores what AI means for specialists and generalists, how marketing organizations may need to evolve, and why companies may eventually need to onboard their AI systems with the same strategic frameworks, principles and ways of working they use to onboard their people.

Because the biggest question may no longer be what AI can do.

It's what we're going to choose to let it do.

Chapters:

00:00 Stop Blaming AI

00:46 Reflecting on Pats McDonald

02:02 AI, Jobs and Human Agency

03:00 AI Is Removing Barriers to Entry

05:13 Why Expertise Still Matters

06:36 Design for Difference, Not Sameness

09:27 The Danger of “Strategy-ish”

11:24 When AI Becomes “Good Enough”

13:53 Do We Still Need Specialists?

14:58 The Marketer of the Future

16:16 Why AI Still Needs Human Expertise

17:07 Turning Ideas Into Reality Faster

20:16 Human Agency Still Matters

20:27 AI and Strategic Drift

21:30 Keeping AI Inside the Strategic Framework

24:00 Should Companies Onboard Their AI?

26:29 Final Thoughts

What if the biggest mistake we're making with AI is the way we talk about it?

Pats McDonald, Chief Strategy Officer at Dentsu Creative, joins the Sleeping Barber Podcast to challenge one of the dominant narratives surrounding artificial intelligence: that AI itself is determining what comes next.

Her argument is simple: AI doesn't make these choices. People do.

We explore what that means for marketers, strategists and leaders as AI becomes embedded in everyday marketing practice.

Pats explains why AI's greatest opportunity isn't simply doing more with less, but enabling ideas that previously weren't possible. We discuss the danger of “strategy-ish”—plausible, polished strategic thinking that never gets somewhere genuinely distinctive—and why strategists should use AI to identify category conventions so they can deliberately break away from them.

We also tackle one of the biggest organizational questions surrounding AI: if technology increasingly performs the work traditionally given to junior marketers, how do we develop the next generation of senior talent?

Plus:

• Why strategists need to understand both consumers and algorithms
• Why curiosity may become more valuable than having all the answers
• How AI can expose category clichés and strategic blind spots
• Why data hygiene and fact-checking become even more important
• How AI could become institutional memory for brands
• Why marketers should design for difference rather than scale sameness
• What responsible AI leadership actually looks like

Ultimately, Pats leaves us with a powerful distinction:

Stop saying “AI will.” Start asking what people, enabled by AI, will choose to do.

Chapters:

00:00 - Introduction

01:03 - Stop Saying “AI Will”

02:58 - How AI Is Changing Strategy

05:40 - Doing What Wasn't Possible Before

06:50 - What Happens to Junior Talent?

08:35 - Specialists vs. Generalists

11:35 - Curiosity as a Strategic Skill

13:45 - Can AI Accelerate Curiosity?

15:10 - Why Leaders Must Keep Learning

16:50 - The Danger of “Strategy-ish”

18:10 - Designing for Difference, Not Sameness

19:45 - AI, Bias and Strategic Blind Spots

21:05 - Why AI Still Needs Fact-Checkers

22:45 - Can AI Prevent Strategic Drift?

24:15 - AI as Institutional Brand Memory

25:55 - Great Examples of AI in Creativity

27:35 - AI Becomes Part of the Creative Toolkit

28:50 - Human Agency and the Future of AI

30:05 - Stop Saying “AI Will”

Ask ten marketers to define brand and you get ten answers. Ask them who owns it and you get one: marketing. Marc and V think that second answer is the problem.

In this reboot of episode 4, they work through three questions with no guest and no script. What is brand? Marty Neumeier calls it the gut feeling people have about you. Roger Martin calls it generating confidence. Both descriptions point at things the promotion team does not control.

Who owns it? V argues brand needs its own team, possibly reporting to the CEO, because the frontline, the packaging, the product roadmap and the customer service queue all write the brand whether marketing likes it or not. Marc pushes back on where the line sits, and lands on why an ad only ever amplifies the truth.

Why is any of it useful? This is where it gets uncomfortable. NPS goes up when you lose customers. Last click hands the credit to the channel that was standing closest to the till. Share of search actually predicts something. And the retention economics everyone repeats turns out to be a thought experiment nobody checked.

Recorded in 2021. Republished because the org chart problem has not moved.

What happens when AI makes marketing more efficient, but every dollar saved gets taken out of the marketing budget?

Welcome back to the Barber’s Brief, where we unpack the marketing stories, ideas and creative work that caught our attention.

This week, we start with what might be one of the unintended consequences of the AI revolution: the efficiency spiral. As marketers use AI to accomplish more with less, are they inadvertently proving that their organizations need less marketing investment?

We also explore why marketing may have the "loneliest seat at the table," despite having one of the broadest views of the business, and why marketers need to reconnect what they do to financial outcomes if they want greater influence inside organizations.

Then we turn to Google. A German court ruling could fundamentally change the relationship between platforms, publishers and AI-generated answers by treating Google's AI Overviews as Google's own content. If an answer belongs to Google, does the responsibility for that answer belong to Google too?

Finally, Marc's Ad of the Week takes us back to Cannes with Columbia Sportswear's Expedition Impossible, a brilliantly committed challenge to flat-earthers that demonstrates why great creative showmanship is about much more than spectacle.

In this episode:

• The AI efficiency spiral
• Why AI should be treated as a growth tool, not simply a cost-saving tool
• Marketing's "panoramic view" of the business
• Why marketing needs to get beyond communications
• Connecting marketing activity to financial outcomes
• Google's emerging responsibility for AI-generated answers
• The changing economics of AI search
• Columbia Sportswear's Expedition Impossible
• Why showmanship makes great advertising memorable

Chapters:

00:00 Welcome to the Barber's Brief

00:34 The AI Efficiency Spiral

01:01 How CMOs Are Funding AI

02:15 Why Smaller Companies May Be Winning With AI

03:22 AI as a Growth Tool, Not a Cost-Cutting Tool

05:49 Marketing Has the Loneliest Seat at the Table

06:12 Marketing's Panoramic View of the Business

08:43 Does the Rest of the Business See Marketing Differently?

10:42 Why Marketing Feels Unpredictable

12:31 Should Everything Marketing Does Link to Financial Outcomes?

13:39 Marketing's Retreat Into Communications

15:16 Getting Marketing Back Into the Business

16:36 Google's AI Search Liability Problem

18:45 When Google Becomes the Answer, Who Is Responsible?

20:18 How AI Overviews Are Changing Search Behaviour

23:18 Ad of the Week: Columbia's Expedition Impossible

24:02 Challenging Flat-Earthers to Find the Edge of the Earth

25:35 Why Columbia's Commitment Made the Idea Work

27:11 Showing a Different Side of Columbia

28:08 Why Showmanship Makes Advertising Great

28:57 Closing Thoughts

What actually makes marketing effective?

It's tempting to point to great creative.

Or strong media.

Or impressive results.

But after our conversation with Effie Worldwide CEO Traci Alford, we realized effectiveness is something much bigger.

In this Post-Pod we unpack the four-part system behind effective marketing and discuss why leadership, culture and organizational alignment often matter more than any individual campaign.

Topics include:

• Why effectiveness is a system—not a scorecard
• Objectives, insight, creativity and learning
• Why marketers struggle to define the real problem
• Bravery versus risk
• The importance of common language across the C-suite
• Why incentives may be working against effective marketing

We also introduce another edition of our Quick Fire round, highlighting the biggest ideas from the episode.

Chapters:

00:00 - Welcome to the Post-Pod

00:40 - First Impressions of Traci Alford

01:20 - Effectiveness Is a System

03:10 - Are We Solving the Right Problem?

05:15 - Great Systems Need Great Teams

07:30 - Stakeholder Management & Common Language

10:40 - Do Incentives Work Against Marketing?

14:45 - Future Demand & Long-Term Thinking

17:40 - Bravery vs Risk

21:50 - Global Insights vs Statements of Fact

24:05 - ⚡ Quick Fire

24:20 - Best Quote

24:40 - Biggest Insight

25:10 - Most Practical Takeaway

25:40 - Biggest Challenge for Marketers

25:50 - Debate Question

26:05 - Closing Thoughts

Most companies treat effectiveness like a scoreboard. Traci Alford, Global CEO of Effies Worldwide, sees the entries from 130 countries, and she says that is exactly where it goes wrong.

Measuring the crop does not grow it.

In this conversation recorded in Cannes, Traci lays out the 4 things behind every winning case:

1. understand the business problem
2. find a real insight rather than a statement of fact
3. execute the creative brilliantly, and
4. measure what happened so you can learn from it.

Plenty of companies are strong at 1 or 2. Almost nobody is strong at all 4, and fewer still can tell the story that ties them together.

Traci also draws a line most of the industry blurs. Brave is not the same as risky. Risk means you have not thought about your headwinds. Brave means you made a calculated choice and you can defend it in the room. And her data says you cannot do it halfway. Stick to your knitting and execute well, or take the real swing. Hovering in the middle is where work dies.

Marc and V push on the parts that hurt. Why the short term always wins the budget fight. Why agency relationships go sour when a campaign is the only unit of measurement. Why marketing jargon loses the room. And where technology spend quietly eats the money that could have gone into media.

Traci keeps coming back to the same place. This is a people business, and the habit has to live at the executive table, not just in the marketing team.

00:00 Cold open and welcome

02:37 The 4 pillars behind every winning case

05:39 Brave is not the same as risky

09:18 Why this is a people business

13:24 The short term trap and shared accountability

18:28 Talking to the C-suite without the jargon

24:07 Insight is the one most people fail

29:34 Risk retreat, tech debt, and opportunity cost

36:16 What to take home from Cannes

• Effie Worldwide: https://effie.org/
• Tubi "Rabbit Holes" Super Bowl spot https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mROTZBUM1Yk
• Previous SBP episode with Karen Pearce, Rethink
• Ehrenberg-Bass Institute 95:5 rule https://marketingscience.info/news-and-insights/the-955-rule-is-the-new-6040-rule

Brand awareness is one of the most reported metrics in marketing.

It's in almost every board deck.

Almost every brand tracker.

Almost every agency review.

But what if it's measuring the wrong thing?

In this Sharp Cut, Marc and V explore why mental availability matters more than awareness, why Category Entry Points (CEPs) outperform personas as a planning framework, and why marketers should stop asking "Who is our customer?" and start asking "What buying situations do we need to own?"

Topics include:

• Mental availability vs brand awareness
• Why awareness often fails to predict growth
• The power of Category Entry Points
• Creative as a targeting system
• Why Meta is moving away from hyper-targeting
• The measurement framework marketers should actually use

If you've ever presented a rising awareness score alongside a flat business result, this episode is for you.

Chapters:

00:00 - Welcome to Sharp Cuts

00:35 - Why Brand Awareness Is Misleading

02:00 - Mental Availability vs Awareness

03:45 - What Should We Measure Instead?

05:15 - Category Entry Points Explained

07:10 - The Seven Whys Framework

08:00 - Why CEPs Changed the Conversation

09:00 - Creative Becomes the Targeting Tool

11:00 - Why Meta Is Broadening Audiences

12:30 - Two Performance Marketers Confess

15:30 - Where CEPs Go Wrong

16:30 - The Three Cs of Prioritization

17:30 - Distinctive Assets & Memory

18:30 - Bailey's Case Study

19:00 - Stop Measuring Brand Love

20:30 - The New Measurement Framework

21:30 - Final Takeaways

What actually mattered at Cannes?

More importantly...

What should marketers do differently because of it?

In this special collaboration between The Sleeping Barber, That's What I Call Marketing, and System1, we unpack the biggest lessons from Cannes Lions and turn them into practical advice for the second half of the year.

Topics include:

• Mark Ritson & Byron Sharp's rare appearance together
• Why creativity still beats optimization
• AI's real role in advertising
• The rise of creators
• Why memory—not impressions—is becoming the metric that matters
• Why audio may be marketing's biggest opportunity
• The Q4 creative playbook

If you're planning campaigns for the second half of the year, this conversation is your roadmap.

Chapters:

00:00 - Welcome & Why This Conversation Matters

01:20 - What Really Happened Between Byron Sharp & Mark Ritson

05:35 - Where They Still Disagree

06:15 - Why Consistency Is Marketing's Biggest Weakness

09:20 - What Marketers Often Misunderstand

11:45 - AI After Cannes: Hype vs Reality

17:15 - Are We Already Bored of AI?

18:35 - Brand Characters, Consistency & Memory

23:40 - Why Audio Could Be Marketing's Next Big Opportunity

31:30 - Why Radio Still Works

37:20 - Creators: What Most Brands Get Wrong

43:30 - Memory Is Becoming Marketing's Most Important Metric

51:50 - The Q4 Playbook

54:00 - Feels vs Deals

59:00 - Why Great Christmas Ads Return Every Year

1:00:30 - Final Advice for Marketers