Hi Reader - "It is remarkable how much long-term advantage people like us have gotten by trying to be consistently not stupid instead of trying to be very intelligent." That's Charlie Munger, Warren Buffett's partner. Everyone in advertising is hunting the whale (or unicorn, or outlier - pick your metaphor of choice). You know the one. The ad that eats your budget, makes your year, and gets you high-fiving your CFO. Soooo every quarter somebody uncaps a marker and says "what's our big swing?"...

Hi Reader - There's a robot in The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy called Marvin. Full name: Marvin the Paranoid Android. He's the smartest thing in the universe, and he's miserable about it. In one scene, he tells a mattress he's thirty billion times smarter than it is. To prove it, he runs a little test. "Think of a number, any number." "Er, five." "Wrong. You see?" The mattress comes away very impressed. I think about that scene a lot when we use AI to analyze ads. Because the analysis...

Hi Reader - Years ago, I was working on a word game, and we were killing it in the US. So we ran an experiment in the UK. After all, they speak English too, right? I think it was George Bernard Shaw who said: England and America are two countries divided by a common language. (Whoever it was that said it, I was about to prove it.) Anywayyy for our word game, the UK did even better than the US. CPI was strong. Cost per first puzzle played was strong. D1 ROAS was extremely strong, and D7 held...