Out-of-home · July 2026
Why we still inspect out-of-home units in person
A plant photograph is taken in daylight, from a tripod, at the perfect angle. Your customer sees the board at 6:40 p.m. in November, at 55 miles an hour, behind a box truck. Those are different products. We drive the corridor before we recommend a unit, note the actual read time in seconds, check whether the illumination is working, and photograph the approach from the driver’s eye line. Roughly one unit in six that looks strong on paper comes off the plan after an inspection. It is the single least glamorous thing we do and the one that saves clients the most money.
Measurement · June 2026
Reading a post-buy: the four lines that matter
Most advertisers never read their post-buy, and most agencies count on that. Four lines tell you almost everything. First, contracted impressions versus delivered impressions — anything below 95% should trigger a conversation. Second, the daypart distribution: spots quietly shifted into overnight inventory will hit the impression number while destroying effective reach. Third, the make-good schedule, if there is one, and whether it ran in comparable inventory. Fourth, the invoice total against the insertion order. We have found discrepancies on all four in the past twelve months, at reputable vendors, with no bad intent involved. Systems make errors; nobody catches them unless somebody looks.
Planning · May 2026
Frequency is the budget decision nobody discusses
Advertisers ask about reach because reach sounds like value: how many people saw it. But a message seen once by 400,000 people usually does less than a message seen five times by 90,000. In every plan we send, effective frequency is set before the channel mix, and the geography is cut until the frequency target is affordable. This is why we regularly recommend a smaller footprint than a client expects. Cutting a market in half and doubling the weight in the remaining half is, in our experience, the most reliably profitable change available to a regional advertiser.
Co-op · April 2026
Manufacturer co-op: the money sitting on the table
Across our dealer and distributor clients, unclaimed co-op dollars have averaged between 20% and 40% of the available allowance at the point we take over the account. The reasons are always the same: the claim paperwork is tedious, the deadlines are unforgiving, and the creative requirements are specific enough that a non-compliant ad voids the claim entirely. None of that is complicated — it is just work. We build the year’s creative against co-op requirements from the start, archive every tear sheet and affidavit as it arrives, and submit claims monthly rather than in a year-end scramble.
Creative · March 2026
Spanish-language creative is not a translation
A word-for-word translation of an English radio spot reliably underperforms in this region, and it usually sounds like what it is. Idiom, cadence, the order in which the offer arrives, even the length of the call to action all shift. On the Gulf Coast, where Spanish-language stations often deliver the best cost per point in the market, treating that audience as an afterthought is an expensive habit. Write it separately, cast it separately, and test it with someone who is not on your payroll.
Strategy · February 2026
When we tell clients not to advertise
Advertising cannot fix a capacity problem, a pricing problem or a bad customer experience. Twice last year we recommended that a prospective client spend nothing with us: one had a four-week backlog and could not service additional demand, the other had a landing page that lost 80% of visitors before the form. Both came back later, and both are clients now. Saying no is cheaper than being blamed for a campaign that was never going to work.