Madvertising by AdQuick — Advertising, Marketing & Ad Tech Podcast · AdQuick

Andrew Covato - growth and measurement

·32 min·2 clips

Attribution dashboards often lack a true counterfactual, so they miss incrementality.

1. Madvertising by AdQuick focuses on Andrew Covato and his view of growth and measurement at AdQuick's advertising and ad tech podcast. 2. Andrew Covato is the founder and managing director of Growth by Science, and Adam hosts the conversation as a marketer who works with advertising professionals. 3. The episode asks how marketers should measure media investment when ad platforms, analytics tools, and AI all shape the numbers. 4. Andrew says measurement starts with "a healthy dose of skepticism" and a culture of experimentation, which he saw at Netflix. 5. He contrasts that with Google and Meta, which he says try to shape the measurement narrative around their own ad products. 6. Andrew explains that ad platforms optimize for revenue, not for advertiser outcomes, even when they still need to deliver results to keep budgets flowing. 7. He says the core measurement problem has stayed similar across his years at Google, Meta, Netflix, Snap, and eBay. 8. Andrew describes Growth by Science as a consultancy that fills the gap between restrictive SaaS tools and bespoke enterprise needs. 9. He says many SaaS platforms lack the customization that enterprise advertisers need for regional differences, hard-to-measure channels, and nuanced business rules. 10. Andrew defines incrementality as a counterfactual question: what would happen if a channel were turned off or marketing stopped. 11. He says attribution dashboards fail because path data is often incomplete and because the math cannot show absent-channel effects. 12. Andrew argues that explicit treatment-versus-control experiments are the best way to estimate the delta. 13. He recommends a simple geo test for smaller teams, with ads turned off in a few geos for two to four weeks. 14. He says the apparent opportunity cost of pausing ads should be weighed against the cost of badly measuring marketing. 15. Andrew notes that some large advertisers will not buy a channel unless it supports geo-targeting or similar measurement controls. 16. He says AI-based campaigns have been a mixed bag, with some advertisers seeing strong results and others seeing less incrementality than manual tactics. 17. The conversation is informal and practical, with Adam pressing for examples and Andrew answering in a direct consulting style. 18. The tone stays analytical but conversational, and both speakers keep returning to measurement, budget allocation, and advertiser discipline. 19. Listeners who manage paid media, measurement, or ad tech budgets will get the most from it. 20. Listeners seeking brand stories, creative theory, or light entertainment may skip it.

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