Measuring it and operating it, answered in full.
- questions in this group, each answered in full
- 15
- pages the answers are written on, every one linked
- 8
- questions across the whole set
- 148
On this page
What a fidelity score is, and why anyone should publish one
Written on What a fidelity score is, and why anyone should publish one, and rendered here in the same words rather than summarised.
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Is a fidelity score an industry standard?
No. It is this platform's own construct, computed by its own compilers, and there is no external body defining or auditing it. What makes it useful is not authority but consistency: the same function produces it for every channel and every brief, the rationale is published beside the number, and the scores are comparable across the seven because they answer the same question. Treat it as a disclosure rather than as a certification.
Could you not just raise the scores?
Mechanically yes, which is precisely why the numbers are traceable to code rather than to a marketing decision. The scores are literals in the channel compilers, and the ones that hurt — 40 on cinema, 50 on out-of-home, 55 on addressable TV — are the ones that make the 85 on CTV worth anything. A site that publishes only the flattering number has told a reader nothing about how the rest were arrived at.
Does a higher fidelity score mean better performance?
No, and conflating the two is the misreading most likely to cost money. Fidelity measures how close the targeting is to your description of the audience. Performance depends on the creative, the offer, the medium's attention profile and the competitive context, none of which the score touches. Cinema scores lowest and can outperform a precisely targeted display campaign on the things cinema is good at.
Designing a geo-lift test that can actually be powered
Written on Designing a geo-lift test that can actually be powered, and rendered here in the same words rather than summarised.
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How many markets do I need for a geo-lift test?
More than one on each side, and enough total volume that the exposed series can move against its own daily noise. Our matcher takes the top three controls per test market, and the candidate list is twelve UK conurbations. The number that actually decides feasibility is not the market count but the required sample days, which comes out of the power calculation on your baseline mean and standard deviation. Two exposed markets with high volume and well-matched controls beat six thin ones.
Can I run a geo-lift test on a national campaign?
Only if you are willing to withhold media somewhere, which is what makes it a test rather than a report. A campaign that buys everywhere has no holdout, and the honest answer is that its incrementality cannot be measured this way. The alternative designs — modelled attribution, marketing-mix modelling — produce estimates rather than causal evidence, and should carry a different label when they do.
Why refuse to report a number when the test is underpowered?
Because the number is not a weak result, it is a random one. An underpowered design produces estimates that swing across a wide range from noise alone, so the figure it returns says more about which fortnight you happened to run than about the media. Once that figure is in a slide it is indistinguishable from a measured one, and it will be defended in a budget meeting six months later. Returning the required sample days instead tells you what would have to change.
Running paid media from an AI agent without losing control
Written on Running paid media from an AI agent without losing control, and rendered here in the same words rather than summarised.
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Can an AI agent spend money without a human approving it?
Not on this platform, and the block is structural rather than a setting. Consequential calls fail closed unless the incoming request matches an approval a human granted for those exact bytes; spend runs against a mandate carrying an explicit money ceiling and an expiry; and enabling spend on a live line is a separately granted action that an approval alone cannot perform. Agents also cannot revoke or replace authority, close missions, or resolve approvals — those operations have no agent tool at all.
What actually goes wrong when an agent runs advertising?
The costly failures are operational rather than editorial. The common one is a retried activation after an ambiguous supplier response, which produces two live campaigns spending in parallel. The others are an agent inheriting a human's session and approving its own work, an authority that never expires and is forgotten, and an approval granted for one action being spent on a different one. All four are prevented by design decisions rather than by prompting, which is why the questions worth asking of a vendor are infrastructural.
Do I need to trust the model to use an agent safely?
Less than you would expect, and that is the point of putting the controls in the product rather than in the prompt. The model extracts semantics, drafts creative, explains plans and proposes optimisations. It does not compute budgets — deterministic code does the arithmetic against adapter forecasts — and it never emits a vendor segment identifier, because registry tables do that. Where its output has consequences, a human approval bound to the exact action stands between the proposal and the money.
Why most incrementality tests are invalid
Written on Why most incrementality tests are invalid, and rendered here in the same words rather than summarised.
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Can I run an incrementality test on a small budget?
Sometimes, and the deciding factor is rarely the budget alone. It is the combination of conversion volume, baseline variance and the number of independent markets you can separate. A multi-catchment retailer with twenty locations and steady weekly bookings can often power a test on a modest budget; a national brand with one campaign and lumpy conversions frequently cannot power one at any budget. The power calculation answers it in advance, which is the point of running it first.
Is marketing mix modelling a substitute?
No, though it answers an adjacent question. Modelling estimates each channel's contribution from historical patterns without needing identifiers, which makes it valuable for channels that cannot be tracked. It remains correlational, hungry for history and sensitive to specification — two competent modellers can produce materially different answers from the same data. It is evidence, but it is not the same evidence as a controlled experiment, and presenting a model output as proof of causation is the failure the four-verb model exists to prevent.
Frequency capping across channels, and why it usually is not happening
Written on Frequency capping across channels, and why it usually is not happening, and rendered here in the same words rather than summarised.
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Can I just set the same cap on every platform?
You can, and it does not produce the cap you set. Each platform enforces it within its own inventory only, so the aggregate exposure for a household appearing on several channels is the sum rather than the maximum. Setting four on seven channels permits up to twenty-eight. There is no configuration that fixes this from inside the platforms, because none of them can see the others.
What Clearcast and the CAA actually check
Written on What Clearcast and the CAA actually check, and rendered here in the same words rather than summarised.
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How long does clearance take?
Long enough to be the binding constraint rather than the media availability. For cinema, budget around eighteen days from brief to on-screen once clearance is in the path. Broadcast varies with the complexity of the claims: straightforward copy moves quickly, and anything requiring substantiation review takes as long as the review does. Neither is a process to start after the flight has been booked.
MCP for marketers: what the protocol actually changes
Written on MCP for marketers: what the protocol actually changes, and rendered here in the same words rather than summarised.
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Is an AI agent safe to point at a media budget?
It depends entirely on what stands between the agent and the money, and that is an architectural question rather than a question about the model. The things to establish: that the agent uses the same execution path as a human rather than a parallel one, that consequential operations are absent from its surface rather than merely discouraged, that authority carries an explicit ceiling and expiry, and that an ambiguous supplier response stops the run rather than being retried. Where those hold, the model's fallibility is contained by design rather than by prompting.
First-party data in UK media buying
Written on First-party data in UK media buying, and rendered here in the same words rather than summarised.
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Can I upload a customer list to target on CTV?
Not through AdBuyMCP today. The consent-based identifier that would carry a first-party list onto streaming inventory requires an operator agreement, and the adapter is an explicit non-transacting stub until one exists — the compiler emits an empty identifier list, so no plan carries one. On the social platforms, list matching works because they hold the identifiers themselves, and that route is unaffected.
If the answer above raises a question about your own budget, that is the sort of thing a forty-five minute working session is for.
Talk it through148 questions, grouped by subject
Every question answered anywhere on this site sits in one of 21 groups, and appears in exactly one of them. This is one.
Bring the question this group did not answer.
45 minutes. Bring a real brief and we compile it live. You describe one audience, it compiles into seven channel plans in front of you, and the awkward questions get answered against your own numbers rather than in general.
Design-partner phase· recruiting paid design partners rather than selling self-serve media · what is live, and what is not
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