Why Half Your Media Plan Is a Bonfire with a Spreadsheet

There’s a reason James McDonald sounds less like your average ad exec and more like a guy who just crawled out of the wreckage of 30 years of industry hype—still holding receipts. He’s not bitter. He’s just… awake. While the rest of the marketing world kept sipping the Kool-Aid, James was over in the corner sniffing it and asking, “Wait, who made this, and why does it taste like fraud?”

This is a man who has been around since ad servers were dial-up and Flash banners ruled the earth. He’s seen agencies fall in love with shiny new metrics, declare them holy scripture, and then quietly walk them out back when no one was looking. His vibe is somewhere between jaded prophet and disillusioned sensei—equal parts “I told you so” and “you still don’t get it, do you?”

So let’s talk about what he does get—and what most of you need to hear, whether you like it or not.

If you're still hanging your strategy on search ads, James wants to talk to you. Not because he thinks you're stupid. No, worse—he thinks you're complicit.

Here’s his take: relying on Google to run your search campaigns and tell you how well they’re doing is like letting a casino manage your finances and then trusting them when they tell you, “Don’t worry, you’re winning.” They’re the house. They always win.

James compares it to sticking a Campbell’s Soup poster on the sidewalk outside a supermarket and then taking credit for every single can sold inside. "You put a poster out, and people walk into the store. Sure, they were going to buy soup anyway. But now, somehow, your ad gets all the credit?" That’s search attribution logic. Just showing up before the purchase doesn’t mean you caused it—but Google sure wants you to think it does.

He’s also violently allergic to the gospel of branded search. “Google reps call me weekly, telling me I have to buy my own brand terms,” he says, sounding like someone who's been through this too many times to count. “I've never seen incrementality from a search campaign unless someone hadn’t been doing search properly to begin with.”

So why do people keep spending millions on it?

Because, as James says, "there are no Yellow Pages anymore." Search isn't evil. It's just misunderstood. It's shelf space. It's digital convenience. It's the aisle sign, not the endcap. Treat it like a utility, not a religion.

Ah, frequency—the go-to crutch for marketers who don’t trust their message to stick. You've heard it a thousand times: “It takes three exposures to make a message land.” It’s repeated in boardrooms like it’s carved into the walls of some marketing temple. But according to James, it’s complete garbage.

“The idea that three ads equals memory? That’s not how human recall works,” he says. “That’s just something we told ourselves to justify ad spend.”

James once ran a campaign early in his career where he jammed as much frequency as possible into a short time frame, thinking it would leave a lasting impression and allow him to coast for months. It didn’t. The campaign tanked. “It just failed miserably,” he admits. Because, as it turns out, memory doesn’t respond to brute force.

The goal isn’t to blast someone until they submit. It’s to remind them right before they forget. Frequency, he says, should act like a soft nudge just as someone’s memory begins to fade—not a hammer that assumes repetition equals persuasion.

Meanwhile, in campaigns where frequency was strategically restrained, the results soared. He cites a Sydney campaign that stopped bombarding viewers and instead focused on extending reach. The client’s market share jumped by several points, and revenue shot up 30%, without increasing spend. The strategy? Hit people once a month—because that’s what the purchase cycle demanded. Not three times a day.

Here’s where James goes full neuroscience.

Most marketers, he says, don’t understand the real job of advertising. “Advertising exists to reduce the cognitive load,” he explains. It’s not about clicks, impressions, or vanity metrics. It’s about making it easier for someone to choose you when they’re finally in-market. That’s it. That’s the gig.

If someone walks into a grocery store and instinctively grabs your brand without a second thought, that’s success. Not the ad that got a click last Tuesday from someone with fat fingers.

James argues that humans aren’t rational shoppers—we’re walking algorithms of laziness, habit, and impulse. “If we had to rationally buy our groceries every week, we’d never leave the store,” he says. So the real power of advertising is its ability to make your product feel inevitable.

That means attention > awareness. Memory > impressions. Familiarity > targeting. And yes, sometimes a giant logo on a cold night before breakfast is more powerful than your entire funnel.

Every time someone says "our CTR is up," a part of James dies inside.

He’s gone through the motions. He’s studied CTR. He’s tried to correlate it with profit. He’s built models, done the tests, pulled the data. His conclusion? Click-through rate is a ghost in a spreadsheet. It looks like something. It sounds like something. But in reality? It’s nothing.

Unless that click leads to immersive content—something people actually engage with for minutes, not milliseconds—it’s a hollow number. One client had high CTR and no sales lift. Another had a CTR increase and declining profit margins. His verdict: "If CTR moves but revenue doesn’t, why are we still worshipping this metric like it’s divine?"

His best theory? Because it’s easy. CTR gives us something to point to, something to optimize. It's quantifiable. It's pretty. And it lets marketers pretend they're in control—even when they’re not.

James isn’t saying measurement is bad. He’s saying most of it is a lie.

Attribution today is the advertising equivalent of a Rorschach test: everyone sees what they want, and the ink is bought and paid for by the platforms. Marketers cling to platform reports like gospel because, as James puts it, “if it can be measured, it can be managed.” Even if what you’re measuring is total nonsense.

He’s watched clients make entire budget decisions off the back of one flawed dashboard, never once asking where the data came from or what it really meant. And the platforms are more than happy to keep the illusion alive. "If you're relying on the platform selling you ads to also measure their effectiveness, you're already cooked."

Real measurement, he says, should come from triangulation—multiple sources, third-party audits, cross-referencing ad servers, and most importantly, matching anything to business results. It’s not about chasing the “right” metric. It’s about finding what moves the needle in real life.

Advertising, says James, still works. But only when we stop trying to engineer it like a math problem and start understanding it like a human one.

If your ad isn’t seen, remembered, or emotionally triggering something—then it’s not an ad. It’s scenery. And no amount of CTR inflation or post-rationalized attribution will save you from that truth.

So if you're still pouring your budget into search like it's a slot machine, hammering people with frequency until they unsubscribe from reality, or bragging about CTR while sales stay flat—James has a message:

You're not advertising. You're paying rent on delusion.

Think that stung? Wait until we talk about why your attention metrics are probably fake and your media plan is a graveyard of short-termism.
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