VP Strategy & Operations @ Prescient AI | Helping omnichannel brands to optimize spend | Co-founder Don't VLOOKUP

I didn’t come up through marketing.

I came up through finance.

Investing, M&A, diligence across hundreds of omnichannel brands.

I then became an operator, managing and deploying budgets directly and making the pitch to finance for more. 

The same questions came up every time:

Where should the next dollar actually go? How can we scale profitably? 

Marketing was always the largest variable line-item that went chronically underutilized. 

ROAS looked great in decks.

Cash flow and lifetime value told a different story.

The real issue wasn’t growth.

It was efficiency of working dollars - marketing, inventory, and capital tied up in the wrong bets.

So teams default to decisions without a more forward-thinking lens: 

• Optimize to what could be tracked with clicks

• Undervalue upper-funnel channels

• Cut spend that *looked* inefficient

• Then wonder why demand fell apart weeks later

That gap is why I joined Prescient.

Most tools explain yesterday yet ignore the reality that conditions on the field are constantly changing.

We focus on how dollars actually move the business - across channels, over time, and beyond last-click.

Not perfect attribution.

Better decisions that break down the barriers between marketing and finance to invest with confidence.

As I’ve been working through Q4’25 earnings from Meta Facebook, Google, AppLovin, Pinterest, Snap Inc., and Reddit, Inc. and since I talk to many investors on the broader category, one theme keeps jumping out.

Reported efficiency metrics (ROAS, CPA, conversion rate) are not comparable across platforms - even though they’re often discussed as if they are.

Pinterest’s CEO captured it well “…the industry has advanced measurement and attribution with large platforms becoming more aggressive and claiming credit for outcomes even when they do not own the click or conversion.”

While this comment points at Meta’s dominance in lower-funnel personalization and retargeting, the broader issue applies across the ecosystem.

Every major platform reports on its own pixeled conversions. 

Every platform optimizes toward what it can see. 

That makes cross-platform ROAS comparisons structurally flawed.

This is precisely why third-party measurement is becoming red hot - not just for brands, but for publishers whose value sits higher in the funnel.

If you’re Pinterest, Snap, or Reddit, and you’re trying to convince investors you can compete with Meta or Google on “performance,” you're running into the same trap.

The market will expect apples-to-apples efficiency comparisons.

But top-of-funnel platforms rarely win on last-click ROAS - and they’re not designed to. 

That is where tools like MMM and incrementality can come into play, but the reality is that these tools are not widely adopted as universal standards of comparison. 

I strongly believe there is room for all of these players to grow ad budgets - but only if they are evaluated based on their role in the funnel.

I still also believe brands and investors will continue to overweight trackable direct response signals.

But as omnichannel measurement matures, so will the relative definition of performance and how it’s measured.

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VP Strategy & Operations @ Prescient AI | Break down marketing and finance budget siloes | Co-founder Don’t VLOOKUP | Vibe coder

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