The revenue climbed. I assumed we'd spent our way there. We hadn't.
Sales rose on a marketplace and my first instinct was that we'd spent more. We hadn't — the budget was mostly idle. Why structure, not spend, is the real lever in retail media.
Topic
Paid Media
A collection of 3 issues
A month of spend, zero sales. The hard part was deciding which zeros were real.
AI pulled thirty days of ad receipts for a furniture brand in an hour. The judgement was sorting real zeros from scheduled zeros from broken-measurement zeros before cutting the budget.
I switched off a dozen campaigns this week. Off had to mean off.
Event-tied campaigns have a shelf life. Cutting a whole cohort cleanly — pause not delete, consistent naming, an eye on the learning phase — is its own discipline.