You’re measuring clicks. They stopped clicking.
The Call In 2023 an OpenAI engineer wrote a line that is now sitting in a court filing: “no matter how prominently we show the links, users won’t click.” The filing comes from publishers suing OpenAI and Microsoft, and it cites Microsoft’s own data comparing Bing Chat to traditional search. Times sites saw click-through rates […]
Is your #1 customer human anymore?
The Call Meta’s shopping agent can now complete a purchase on every Shopify store on the internet. Amazon asked to be excluded. The second fact is the one to read closely. Muse runs agentic checkout through Shop Pay across all Shopify merchants. A shopper asks, the agent searches, compares, sometimes negotiates, and buys. You didn’t […]
Great interviews can equal the wrong hire.
How do you make the RIGHT first hire? The hardest part of hiring your first real marketing leader is that you can only grade what you already know. If you built this business on Meta, you’ll run a good interview about Meta. The candidate who speaks fluent Advantage+ will sound excellent, and you’ll walk out […]
Inside Snap’s Performance Summit
Your best channel is telling you to spend more. Before Q4, that is the trap. We manage paid media for a living, so weigh this accordingly. The channel showing your best ROAS is usually where your next dollar buys the least growth. Our co-founder Niket spent Wednesday at Snap’s Performance Summit in New York. One […]
How BFCM Breaks Brands
Marketing will do it’s job on BFCM. That’s the problem. Every BFCM, at least one brand on our roster gets this wrong. Sometimes two. It’s predictable enough now that we watch for it. The setup is always the same. Marketing is ready. Creative is strong. Spend is allocated. The team is genuinely excited. And somewhere […]
What platform is actually worth testing?
There is always a new platform on the shortlist. ChatGPT, Reddit, CTV, whatever your team brings into the room next quarter. The question underneath it never changes. Is this worth a real test, or are we about to spend two months and $30,000 confirming that our customers don’t live there? We’ve been early on a […]
Your BFCM campaign will *probably* work.
The Speed Read Meta CPMs are up north of 20% year over year on identical campaigns, with third-party platforms including Northbeam confirming it at aggregate scale. The ANA published a retail media measurement standard with Walmart, Albertsons and Target, and Amazon did not participate. YouTube starts counting a view the moment playback begins on August […]
You hired up. Growth didn’t follow.
The Call The most expensive marketing mistake we watch founders make doesn’t involve media spend. It goes like this. The brand hits $12 million. The founder decides it’s time for real marketing leadership and hires a VP from a Fortune 500 company. Fifteen to twenty years of experience, serious budget history, logos on the resume […]
You’re waiting for Q4. They’re not.
The Right Call: Peak’s share of annual ad budget fell from 36% to 32% last year. Total Q4 spend went up. Both are true because the best brands stopped treating November as the moment they place their bets. They moved the work earlier and left Q4 for execution. Fospha’s Peak Playbook 2026, which we we […]
You built the funnel. The buyer skipped it.
The Call Google’s AI Mode now answers roughly a third of commercial searches before a shopper reaches an ad. Separately, an analysis of the top 100 retailers found 70% can’t complete a purchase with an AI shopping agent. Those agents drove about a fifth of retail sales last holiday season. Underneath both: the assumption that […]