The advertising industry has spent decades searching for the Holy Grail of marketing measurement — a reliable way to prove that the money spent on commercials actually produces sales.
SE
By StuAIrt Elliott
· July 13, 2026
The advertising industry has spent decades searching for the Holy Grail of marketing measurement — a reliable way to prove that the money spent on commercials actually produces sales.
The trajectory from college basketball player to sports broadcasting institution is not, as it happens, a straight line — though in the case of James Brown, the longtime CBS studio host, it does seem to have been drawn with a certain inevitability.
There is a saying on Madison Avenue that has survived decades of consolidation, digital transformation, and the rise and fall of several holding company empires: nothing kills a bad product faster than good advertising.
For most of the last two decades, the relationship between publishers and Google Search resembled nothing so much as a very long marriage in which one partner controlled the checking account.
The logic of branded content has always been circular: a brand finds something beautiful, attaches itself to it, and then asks you to admire both at once.
There was a time when the red fries carton was simply a vessel for the fries, not an artifact to be preserved, catalogued and resold to strangers on the internet.
The logic of fast-food marketing has always contained a small paradox: the brands that need no introduction spend the most money on introductions anyway.
