Published in partnership with Measured
Media measurement and attribution isn’t often a field that people intentionally go into after going to business school. How did you end up focusing on this space?
I’ve spent the best years of my career at the intersection of advertising and technology, inspired by the opportunity to give marketers an edge to drive growth. Across my career, I’ve never seen a technology deliver more impact for customers than what I’ve experienced with incrementality measurement.
I started out as a sales engineer, selling software and hardware in the test and measurement space to telcos. It was a great foundation in consultative, high-tech sales. After business school, I joined a friend’s Series A digital out-of-home (DOOH) startup, which gave me a crash course in the advertising ecosystem, how media is bought, sold, and measured, and the role agencies and ad tech play. One of DOOH’s biggest challenges at the time was measurement, since it lacked deterministic tracking in a digital-first world.
The industry’s demand for accountability eventually pulled me back to my roots in measurement. A mentor introduced me to Visual IQ just as Multi-Touch Attribution (MTA) was gaining traction. It was 2011, and I was struck by the transformative potential of the technology to help marketers truly see which media drives business performance. I was hooked.
Nearly 15 years later, the category has evolved dramatically, but what excites me most hasn’t changed: helping marketers get to the truth of media effectiveness so they can make confident high stakes investment decisions.
Did you think there were opportunities to improve on the solutions out there, or was it something that captured your interest for other reasons? There have always been a lot of other solutions out there for attribution or other measurement-related products.
Absolutely. Ten years ago, when we were deploying MTA, the rise of the walled gardens was already making it difficult to track users across platforms, and user-level paths were left with too many gaps.
We turned to incrementality testing to fill those gaps, and that’s when the light bulb went off. Experimentation wasn’t just a workaround, it was a fundamentally better way to get to causality. Where MTA and Media Mix Modeling (MMM) were built on correlation, incrementality offered a direct path to understanding media’s true impact on business outcomes.
From the beginning, my cofounder and I believed incrementality would become a must-have for brands. Not just to improve on what existed, but to enable smarter, more effective media investment decisions. The only surprise has been how long it’s taken the industry to get here. In hindsight, maybe that’s a good thing, because after years of investment and tens of thousands of hours working side by side with clients, today’s solution is far more advanced and easier to adopt than ever.
Now, we’re at a moment where incrementality is finally being recognized as essential, and it’s energizing to see marketers embracing it as the foundation for more accountable decisions that drive real business results.
With Measured and your prior start-up in the space, what guided the ways in which you wanted to differentiate? Were there specific problems you knew the market had and which you thought you knew how to solve? Or was it just a big market that was underdeveloped in your view, and you knew you could find opportunities to help marketers in it?
What excites me most in business is when bleeding-edge innovation is applied to real, high-value problems, and companies radically improve their trajectory as a result.
I’ve been fortunate to work alongside brilliant technologists throughout my career. At Measured, we’ve built a team that combines top-tier product, engineering, and data science talent with deep application expertise. That balance is critical. It’s not just about having the smartest technologists, it’s about applying that talent to solve practical problems that truly matter for marketers.
When we started Measured, we weren’t guessing at what marketers needed. We had been in the field, working closely with brands, and had a clear thesis: incrementality measurement could solve one of the industry’s biggest challenges, assigning attribution credit anchored in causality. At the time, marketers were still fumbling with broken attribution models, billions of dollars were flowing into media, and yet the foundations of measurement were deeply flawed.
The problem is clear. The solution is clear. The opportunity is massive. If you’re not measuring correctly, you’re wasting money and missing opportunities for growth. Today, the challenge isn’t proving the methodology, we’ve clearly done that. It’s cutting through inertia and getting teams to actually embrace change. That takes curiosity and resolve. When brands use incrementality to make decisions (or optimize media), waste becomes growth. This is exactly why we've invested years building Measured and why we’re as excited as ever about the space.
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