The Paper Trail
Insights, research, and case studies from our forensic analysis work.
The Strike Team Advantage
The conversation about AI and teams has fixated on headcount. The more useful question is what becomes possible when your team is structured to take advantage of what AI actually changed — and what the right structural unit looks like.
The GTM Audit: What's Probably Hiding in Your Tag Manager
After years managing GTM across multiple markets and compliance environments, the same categories of problems appear every time. Here's what we look for first, and why it matters more than most marketers realise.
SaaS Is Dead. Long Live SaaS.
The SaaS-pocalypse of 2026 isn't the end of software-as-a-service. It's the end of single-layer, single-dashboard tools that operate in isolation. What comes next connects the stack — and changes what software is for.
What Your Dashboard Isn't Telling You
Your marketing dashboard shows numbers that look right. Clean graphs, steady trends, reasonable conversion rates. The question nobody asks is whether those numbers are accurate — and the answer, more often than not, is that they aren't.
The $10,000 Tag Manager Mistake
A mid-market ecommerce company. $40,000/month in Google Ads. ROAS looks healthy at 4.2x. The team is happy. The CMO is happy. The numbers are wrong.
Why Your Agency Charges $5,000/Month But Can't Tell You What's Actually Working
The problem isn't your agency. It's that reporting on campaign activity and verifying that the measurement infrastructure works are two different disciplines — and almost nobody is doing the second one.
The Perception Gap: What the Data Shows
The gap between what businesses think their marketing infrastructure is doing and what it's actually doing is not an edge case. It's the default. Here's where the data shows the widest divergence.
What Enterprise Marketing Teams Actually Pay for Infrastructure Visibility
Enterprise marketing teams subscribe to 5–15 tools to monitor different aspects of their infrastructure. Each one is excellent at its narrow scope. Nobody asks what it actually costs to assemble the whole picture.
What Five Years in Regulated Financial Services Taught Me About Marketing Infrastructure
When a misconfigured tag could trigger a regulator and "close enough" meant a compliance failure, you learn to treat tracking as infrastructure — not an afterthought. The lessons apply everywhere.
Spec-Driven Development: Why We Write the Blueprint Before We Touch the Stack
Every trade I've worked in — electrical, litigation support, financial services — had the same rule: you don't build before the plans are signed off. Marketing is the one discipline that forgot it.
GDPR Rollout Lessons: What Marketers Got Wrong and Why It Still Matters
Serving as APAC project liaison for a global GDPR implementation taught me that compliance failures are almost always architecture problems in disguise — not legal problems.
Programmatic Advertising in Regulated Markets: A Field Guide
Running display and programmatic campaigns for a derivatives broker across APAC means operating at the intersection of ad tech and financial regulation. Here's what five years of that teaches you.
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