In 2007 I lost $1,500 of my own student money on a display arbitrage play, chasing conversions I couldn’t actually see. The clicks were converting — the tracking wasn’t. By the time I figured out which placements were responsible, the campaign was over and the money was gone.
That was the moment I learned the lesson that’s run my career ever since: the lever in paid media isn’t the headline, the creative, the platform, or the audience. It’s whether you can see what’s actually happening underneath. Everything else is downstream of that.
Twenty years of buying paid traffic later, the lesson hasn’t changed. The channels have.
How I got here
2005–2010: Search, AdWords, SEO
The first five years were Google AdWords clicks at $0.02–0.20 and SEO that still rewarded keyword density more than content quality. I learned the discipline most agencies still don’t believe: the channel doesn’t matter, the math does. Whether you make money on any paid channel depends on conversion economics, not on the platform you happen to be running on.
2010–2015: Display, direct buys, programmatic, adult
Pre-programmatic, I was negotiating CPM deals directly with the major web publishers of the 2000s–2010s — sometimes via insertion order, sometimes on a handshake call after a conference. I built my first proper tracking stack in this era because direct buys put the attribution problem on you, not on the platform.
When programmatic and real-time bidding arrived around 2012, most agencies didn’t make the transition cleanly. They kept treating it like display when the math had become intelligent bidding against real-time auction data. The agencies that survived treated programmatic as a tracking problem first and a creative problem second.
In parallel, I spent significant time running adult traffic on ExoClick and similar networks. Most marketers skip this in their bio. I won’t — adult traffic is the most aggressive direct-response environment in all of paid media. Every penny is measured. Creative gets tested at a speed nobody else can match. If you can run profitably on ExoClick, you can run profitably anywhere — and the discipline of every cent must convert still shapes how I approach mainstream brand work today.
2013 onward: Meta, pop, and the volume era
Significant Meta spend from 2013, and pop traffic for affiliate offers in parallel. Both taught the same lesson: at scale, the differentiator is creative iteration speed. Meta rewards brands that can ship and analyze 20 creative variants a week. Pop rewards affiliate buyers who can rotate angles on a daily cycle. Neither rewards careful thinkers who ship slowly.
2015 to today: Native
Native felt different from the start. The advertorial format rewards careful writing — closer to print direct-mail copy than to social ad creative. The platforms (Taboola, Outbrain, Mediago, Newsbreak, Microsoft Audience, MGID, and others) reward patience and creative iteration. Each one has specific quirks that take years to learn — auction dynamics, sectionalization rules, geo-by-publisher performance patterns, tracking-pixel idiosyncrasies.
Eleven years in, native is where most of my direct-response math currently works. It’s also one of the few major channels where dedicated specialists still have a real edge over generalist agencies and over the platforms’ own account teams. That gap is the wedge — and it’s what Adnetico is built around.
The tracking stack
Most of what makes a paid campaign profitable lives in the tracking layer, not the creative. Over twenty years I’ve built attribution infrastructure on every major tool worth knowing:
Voluum — the default for native ads since the platform shipped. Thousands of campaigns. Custom postback flows. Multivariate testing capabilities that identify winning creatives faster than any platform’s native tools.
RedTrack — strongest for affiliate-side attribution. When budget runs across multiple offers and you need clean conversion attribution at the source level, RedTrack does it cleaner than the alternatives.
Bemob — under-recognized. Smart funnel-stage attribution that catches what the others miss, particularly on programmatic + native overlap.
AppsFlyer + Adjust — the mobile attribution standards. Extensive work with both for app install campaigns, including the post-iOS 14.5 fingerprinting and server-side measurement work.
Google Analytics 4 — the reference layer most clients already have. I rebuild the GA4 implementation about half the time, because the default setup misses roughly 30% of conversions on native traffic.
If your current setup has any of these (or doesn’t), I can usually tell within an hour of looking at your account whether you’re measuring what you think you’re measuring. That’s the first thing the audit answers.
AI in the workflow
Three years ago I started integrating AI tools across the media buying workflow. Today, AI handles parts of the work that used to take days — creative iteration, copy variants, advertorial drafting, attribution analysis, landing page generation, video script production.
But most “AI for marketing” tools don’t earn their keep. I’ve tested most of the major ones — the headline generators, the image generators, the chatbot copywriters, the agent frameworks, the analytics layers. The ones that actually save time and sharpen output get into the stack. The rest get politely deleted.
What this means for your account: faster creative iteration cycles, sharper advertorial drafts, deeper-than-default analytics on every campaign — without the AI tax some agencies have started adding to their invoices.
What it doesn’t mean: I’m not selling you “AI services.” I’m a media buyer who happens to be current. The strategy still comes from twenty years of pattern-recognition. AI just speeds up the execution.
How I work
A few principles I run every account by:
Native only — for client work. I’ve bought on every paid channel since 2005. For client engagements I work native exclusively, because that’s where the math currently works and where eleven years of deep experience earns its keep.
I lead every account personally. Strategy through optimization. From the first call through every campaign review, the strategic decisions run through me. That’s the bottleneck and the point.
Tracking before opinions. If the numbers are unclear, the campaign is unclear. Voluum cross-tagging, postbacks, source-level reporting — launch work, not admin.
Honest “no” when it’s not a fit. Most agencies will sell you something even if they shouldn’t. I won’t. If native isn’t right for your offer, stage, or team, I’ll say so on the audit call. There’s nothing worse for both sides than a misaligned engagement.
Alongside, not in place of. If you have a platform team or an in-house buyer already, I work with them, not around them. Most of my engagements keep existing relationships intact and add dedicated focus where the platform team can’t operate at account scale.
Get in touch
If you’re scaling on paid and want a dedicated native specialist — alongside your platform team or in place of a generalist agency — start with a free native ads audit.
If you need one advertorial for a specific offer, without the retainer relationship — order it directly.