Thinking on search, media and measurement

Rates are up and confidence is low, but people are still spending. What the next six months mean for marketing and how to avoid cutting the wrong things.

The economics, channels and measurement that let ecommerce brands keep growing profitably as acquisition costs rise, AI changes discovery and brands expand into new markets.

How buyers find businesses in search results, AI answers and AI assistants, what each discipline does and what the evidence supports.

Where AI is measurably changing marketing performance in 2026, where the evidence is thin and a simple test for deciding what to adopt.

What the effectiveness evidence says about balancing brand building and activation, why the ratio is a starting point rather than a rule and how to measure both.

Why revenue-based ROAS can hide unprofitable growth, how profit-based bidding works in Google Ads and what to consider before sharing margin data.

How a leading Australian medical supplies business lowered acquisition costs and grew revenue by joining paid search, technical SEO and customer data.

Why platform attribution overstates and understates at the same time, how marketing mix modelling and incrementality tests fill the gaps and how to build a measurement plan a finance team will trust.

How to decide what to build internally, what to buy from specialists and how to make a hybrid model work as a business scales across channels and markets.

Where the US search and ad tech cases stand after the 2025 and 2026 remedies decisions, what has actually changed and what advertisers and publishers should do now.

What Australia's privacy reforms have already changed, what the 2026 exposure draft proposes and how brands operating across markets can build one approach that holds up.