Writes about media, tech, and AI business for people who actually run digital. Former agency lead. Skeptic of frameworks that read better than they perform.
Google Ads scripts still earn their keep in 2026 doing deterministic, boring work: budget alerts, zero-conversion flagging, out-of-stock pausing. AI can now draft them from a sentence. The judgment about the rules is still yours, and that’s the whole point.
Third-party cookies stopped carrying your retargeting a while ago. The value moved to first-party audiences, server-side signals, and the automation layers inside Meta and Google. Here’s what to keep funding and what to quietly cut.
The most cited number in marketing came from analyzing 996 campaigns and taking the mean. It was never a law, and applying it to a three-year-old brand burning runway is how good research becomes bad strategy. The rule is real. The dogma is the problem.
The average e-commerce conversion rate is somewhere between 1.4% and 2.96%, which tells you almost nothing. AI personalization is a real lever, but the honest number is a 10-30% relative lift, not the miracle in the case study. Here’s where it actually shows up.
