Category: In the News

Zach Morrison, Chief Executive Officer and board director, Tinuiti

In marketing — as in all aspects of growing a business overall — it’s imperative to know up front how much a team is willing to lose, how long they’re willing to try and when to walk away.

Yet, too often, waste is treated like a bad word, instead of asking: Is this the cost of growth? Or just a line item our team has learned to ignore?

Waste is a feature, not a bug

Every marketing budget should have waste in it. If there’s zero waste, the company isn’t trying anything new — not experimenting with new channels, formats, measurement, tech or audiences. The team isn’t creating the conditions where something new and valuable can emerge. The kind of growth that only shows up once outside of comfort zones, where things feel unfamiliar, risky, even a little scary.

No one in board meetings, client reviews or leadership sessions says, “Only bring me ideas that are guaranteed to work.” What leaders want is smart thinking, fast feedback and full transparency. They want to know: How long will you test? How much risk will you take? What will you do with what you learn?

Results are never perfect out of the gate, whether it’s testing into AI SEO, TikTok, streaming TV or niche retail media networks. But with the right measurement and decision frameworks, early inefficiencies often point the way to growth.

Cloud-based tech company AppFolio is a perfect example of this. When its marketing platform held the company back, it dared to try something new. Tinuiti helped the company experiment by pitting a new programmatic solution against AppFolio’s existing tech. This calculated waste unlocked unprecedented flexibility and drove a 3x increase in click-through rate.

This kind of testing isn’t a waste — it’s an investment. The problem is that most marketers don’t draw a line between smart experimentation and wasteful drift. That’s when valuable media dollars leak out.

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During the annual two-day DMexco ad tech, media and marketing conference held this week in Cologne, Germany, Digiday participated in four onstage fireside interviews that touched on a variety of top-of-mind topics for the 40,000 or so execs in attendance.

They ranged from adopting a more agency-led mindset in the attempt to make commerce a more unified landscape, how curation and programmatic will be an important future avenue for ad tech, the rise of transaction data as a possible replacement for probabilistic tracking (cookies) and how creative and technology innovations, especially in terms of AI, must be balanced in order to enhance engagement with Gen Z on Snap rather than interrupt it.

The commerce stage chat with Criteo CEO Michael Komasinski focused on the evolution of e-commerce, and its rapid growth at 2-3 times the rate of physical retail, driven by increased product depth and marketplaces. Per Komasinki, key drivers include interoperability, identity standards and AI’s impact on product search. Blockers such as measurement standards and fragmentation were noted by him as well, as was the importance of an agency mindset, which prioritizes full-funnel and cross-channel strategies and incrementality — prior to helming Criteo, he was CEO of Dentsu Americas.

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