The Media Guide Perspective

The Standing Arguments Behind This Column

Individual pieces here cover different topics, but a handful of positions recur because the same underlying pattern keeps showing up across different problems.

• Platform self-reporting needs independent verification. Whoever sells the media and measures whether it worked has a structural incentive problem, regardless of intent. See Retail Media and Attribution.
• Opacity is the actual risk, not the pricing model. Vague answers about a new fee or monetisation layer are informative on their own. See Unraveling the SaaS Proposals of Magnite and PubMatic.
• Retention beats acquisition once acquisition gets structurally harder. The economics shift, not just the fashion. See Why Retention Stops At Loyalty.
• Accountability should never quietly transfer to an outside party. True of consultancies, true of vendors, true of any engagement structure. See When Consultancies Overwhelm Business Leadership.

Three Ways To Read This Archive, Depending On Why You’re Here

Different visitors land on this archive for different reasons. A quicker way in than scrolling the full list below.

What The M&A Wave Means For Who’s Actually Accountable

Adtech and martech M&A ran hot through 2025, roughly 465 deals, up 13% on the year, headlined by Omnicom’s acquisition of IPG. Every consolidation story gets covered as a scale or capability story. It’s rarely covered as an accountability story, which is the gap worth naming.

When a platform or agency you rely on gets absorbed into a larger entity, the specific person who understood your setup, and the specific team accountable for a commitment made pre-merger, both routinely change without much warning. That’s the same accountability-drift pattern running through When Consultancies Overwhelm Business Leadership, just triggered by a different mechanism. A merger doesn’t automatically create the problem. It does remove the continuity that was quietly preventing it.