Research
The program behind the thesis: how ranking actually works, how audiences actually travel, and how the open web closes its loop.
The Attribution Floor: What the W3C Is Quietly Building Into the Browser
Google, Mozilla, and Meta are co-editing a browser-native attribution standard. It will not replace your measurement stack, but everything in that stack will sit on top of it.
Read the essay →Closing the Loop Outside the Walled Gardens: Who Is Actually Doing It
A survey of every serious attempt to rebuild the closed feedback loop on the open web, and an honest read on which ones are real.
Read the essay →Marketers of Catan: Digital Measurement Can Be Solved With a New Toolkit
Identity measurement is probabilistic on a sample nobody randomized. Place and time are representative by construction: canonical geography, canonical time, one unit for both sides of the transaction.
Read the essay →How a Modern Ad Ranking System Works
The architecture behind every walled-garden ad platform, explained end to end: retrieval, multi-input ranking, auction, and the closed loop that is the real moat.
Read the essay →Segments vs. Embeddings: How Audiences Actually Travel in a Bid Request
The context economy does not replace segments with embeddings. It runs both, and the interesting questions are about model agreement, audit, and set logic.
Read the essay →The Parity Benchmark Hiding in Google's Help Center
Google publicly documents seven contextual inputs to Ad Rank. The open web runs on roughly two of them. That page is the cleanest measure of the gap.
Read the essay →The Models Predict by the Hour. The Buy Settles by the Week.
Auctions clear in milliseconds, but the numbers that decide what the money bought, Nielsen's currencies and Google's mix models, run on three days, seven days, and a week. A public spec just set advertising's clock to the hour.
Read the essay →Meta Dropped the DMA. Advertising Still Has No Map of Its Own.
On June 22 Meta stopped honoring Nielsen's DMA codes in automotive model ads. Nothing about the ground changed. Every model keyed to those codes still has to be rebuilt.
Read the essay →The newest work publishes first on Substack and lands here after. The argument that frames all of it is in AdExchanger.