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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In this episode of the Advertising Heat Check, host Matt Behrend sits down with Jillian White, one of the sharpest ad ops minds in media, to break down what's heating up and what's cooling off in advertising.

Heating up: premium inventory plus personalization. Jillian's team stopped treating cheap CPMs and big-name premium partnerships as the two extremes and found a middle ground: direct deals across multiple partnerships that let them target custom personas, choose the inventory they run on, and actually measure what works. The payoff is cost-efficiency metrics down about 40%. The second lever is a DCO. Instead of waiting six months to produce a video asset, their dynamic content optimization tool shows them which imagery and CTAs a persona engages with, how long it takes someone to convert, and lets them adjust creative in a few weeks. Premium placement earns brand association and recall. DCO layers on personalization at scale, messaging shaped by the behaviors a user has shown, not a guess about who they are.

Cooling off: looking at channels in silos, and using CPM as your efficiency metric. When you judge Google against Meta against the open internet, one channel at a time, you miss how they work together to get someone to convert, and search ends up taking credit for everything upstream. And CPM is a vanity number. Jillian's team built pixels that optimize for cost per site engagement instead, finding more users who spend real time on site and convert down the line. The shift is from efficiency to effectiveness, from a cheap impression to a measurable one that ties back to ROAS.

To close, Jillian shares what's making her smarter lately: a journal called Dig Deeper that asks her each night what she could have done better and where she's challenged. A daily mirror that makes the hard questions a habit.

In this episode:

- Why premium inventory plus personalization beats chasing the cheapest CPM

- How a direct-deal middle ground cut cost efficiency metrics by 40%

- Using DCO to test imagery and CTAs and refresh creative in weeks, not months

- What you miss when you judge Google, Meta, and the open internet in silos

- Why cost per site engagement is a better north star than CPM

- The shift from efficiency metrics to effectiveness and return on ad spend

About the guest: Jillian White has spent 14 years in media for companies including Subway, Panasonic, Mountain America, and Costa Vida. She has worked across traditional and digital channels for both D2C and B2B, handling everything from implementation to optimization and managing DCO operations across multiple internal teams. She is one of the top ad ops experts in the field.

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In this episode of the Advertising Heat Check, host Matt Behrend sits down with Greg Edwards, Senior Director of Marketing at Anglepoint, to break down what's heating up and what's cooling off in advertising.

Heating up: AI-accelerated content and outbound... done with a point of view. Greg's team used to spend months crafting "evergreen" pieces with subject-matter experts, then stretch them for years. Now AI gets them 70% of the way there, and the SME adds the angle only they can. Instead of a single master guide, they ship content tailored to the buyer's exact stage in the funnel. The result: higher-quality MQLs, better conversion to SQLs, and more closed-won. On the outbound side, AI-based SDR tooling scrapes for fit, reads LinkedIn activity, and writes personalized messages that "look honestly more human" than the marketing-speak of old.

The catch Greg keeps coming back to: AI is the average. "If we don't have a specific point of view as a service company, then we are the average of everyone else out there. We're not actually providing any value." The job now is to move at the pace AI makes possible while staying above-average and authentic — avoiding the AI slop that makes every brand sound the same.

Cooling off: traditional SEO and the mass email. Greg has watched organic search traffic fall as AI results eat the clicks, with referral traffic from AI engines rising to fill the gap. His advice for marketers who built a career on Google: restructure your back-end content for AI optimization, and lean harder into conversion rate optimization.

To close, Greg shares what's making him happier and smarter lately: prepping for a two-week family vacation, and finishing an AI-for-marketing course.

In this episode:

• Why AI gets you ~70% of the content, and why your point of view has to do the rest
• How "timely and specific" beats "evergreen" — and lifts MQL-to-closed-won
• Using AI SDR tooling for personalized outbound that reads as human
• What AI Overviews and zero-click search are doing to organic traffic
• Why conversion rate optimization is the new home for SEO talent
• Why the mass email blast is dying and what replaces it

About the guest: Greg Edwards is Senior Director of Marketing at Anglepoint. He spent 15+ years in digital marketing, cutting his teeth at Orange Soda, then Inside Out Development, is master-certified in account-based marketing, and holds an MBA from UVU. Early in his career, he spent time in Shanghai and speaks Mandarin.

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