The auction is
automated.
The argument is not.
Original research on paid media - what the platforms report, what the business recognises, and the distance between them. Fourteen features in this edition. How we did it, the data behind it and what it does not prove.
The platform sees an event. The business sees an outcome.
Every paid media platform reports against the event it can observe. A click, a view, a conversion fired from a pixel it controls. That number is real, and it is not the same number the business books.
Most of what passes for paid media analysis lives inside the platform's own frame - comparing its numbers to its numbers, in its interface, against its definition of success. This desk works from the other direction: from the ledger backwards.
We publish what we find, including where the evidence does not support a conclusion. Every feature states its method, its evidence base and what it cannot establish.
Ads Legendary
The operators who produce this research also run paid media as a service - Google, Meta and LinkedIn, inside your accounts, at 6% of media spend. Your accounts stay yours.
Features
Edition Q1 2026 · 14 features in this deskSpend rose on volume, not price
Nine of twelve major ad channels grew on volume rather than price in Q1 2026. The three exceptions are where the operating decisions actually got harder.
Read the feature →
Google's automation won. Meta's lost half its share.
Advertisers adopted automated buying, then partially reversed. The reversal is the finding.
Retail media stopped being shelf space
Retail media stopped being shelf space and became an audience business.
Digital video became television
The format converged on TV economics while still being bought as digital.
Paid search grew while search shrank
An answer layer sits between the query and the result. Paid search grew anyway.
The 76th-place superpower
India leads the world in AI consumption and ranks 76th on the measure that was supposed to matter.
India builds the founders. It does not keep the companies.
India's AI supply side, counted properly.
China never had an attribution problem
A market that built commerce and media in one system never needed to solve attribution.
The martech market stopped growing
The stack stopped expanding. What replaced expansion is more interesting.
Everyone hired the agent
Agentic tooling arrived across the industry in a single cycle.
Cheap reach, expensive trust
Meta's CPM fell 3%. Reddit's rose 71%. Every shift in social sits between those two numbers.
Everyone cites the same number
Executive content is sold on statistics that cannot be traced to a source.
Cannes winners tested badly with the public
Cannes Lions Film winners, tested with consumers. The top scored 5.9. The average was 2.2.
The app store fight moved almost no money
Two landmark rulings broke the app stores open. 3–6% of revenue moved.
One issue a quarter.
Nothing in between.
Every edition collects the quarter's features and reports across all seven desks into a single issue. No weekly send, no roundups.