In this episode of the Advertising Heat Check, host Matt Behrend sits down with Collin Fleming, a digital media strategist who has spent about 15 years building campaigns for some of the biggest names in sports and entertainment, to break down what's heating up and what's cooling off in advertising.

Heating up: Incrementality, proven with randomized control trials. Collin's biggest lever is showing that marketing actually worked. A randomized control trial holds out a slice of the audience by device ID, then measures the lift between what happened with the campaign and what happened without it. Instead of serving the holdout a brand ad, you serve a neutral PSA, so the difference is clean. So, you can tell a client exactly how much you spent and how much incremental revenue it generated, across the full funnel from upper-funnel traffic down to sales. That is the number that lets a client walk into a room of internal champions and win the budget.

Cooling off: Last-click, last-touch attribution. Collin's line: the two jobs where you never lose are HR and search, because in HR, you never fire yourself, and in search, you get all the credit. He points at GA4, built by Google, which leans on last click because that's where search lives. But based on his campaigns, only one in every seven site visits is actually influenced by a click. The other six are view-through: nobody clicks their AirPods during a streaming audio ad or walks up and taps their TV during a CTV spot.

To close, Collin shares what's making him smarter lately: Mamba mentality (he reads a Kobe Bryant quote every morning) and CEO biographies, most recently Shoe Dog by Phil Knight and The Ride of a Lifetime by Bob Iger, both stories about finding a way when the odds say it can't be done.

In this episode:

• Why randomized control trials, not geo holdouts, give the cleanest read on incrementality
• How holding out by device ID removes the cross-market noise that breaks geo tests
• The full-funnel lift story that helps clients win internal budget battles
• Why retail media is heating up, with spend projected to near $97 billion by 2028
• The case against last-click: only one in seven site visits is influenced by a click
• Where MMM helps, where it misleads, and why lift studies stay the source of truth

About the guest: Collin Fleming is a Senior Strategy Consultant at Agility who has spent about 15 years building and leading digital media strategies for some of the largest brands in sports and entertainment, including ESPN, Netflix, and Caesars Entertainment. His work spans major campaigns and a career built on proving what marketing actually drives.

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