The Marketing Economist.
Marketing and paid media through an economics lens. What's working, what's leaking, and why. Published monthly.
Join founders and CMOs who read their marketing through the P&L.
The economics behind your marketing spend. What's working, what's leaking, and why.
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Google just made it cheaper than ever to scale a mistake
Google Marketing Live 2026 industrialised a new benchmark: $6 back for every $1 spent on Search. Lufthansa and IKEA case studies sit on top of metrics that move fastest when an AI system widens its definition of a valuable click. The cost of measuring the wrong thing just changed.
Marketing as capital allocation, not channel optimization
Marketing budgets are capital allocation decisions. Most organisations manage them like utility bills. That category error explains more structural underperformance than almost any campaign-level problem.
A client's ROAS climbed to 4.1x over twelve months. Gross margin was flat for eleven of them. The platform said the account was working. The P&L said something different. That distance is what a marketing economist explains.
What marketing is actually producing
The gap between what the platform reports and what shows up on the P&L. Each issue traces one business's marketing spend to its real commercial outcome.
The real cost of a customer
What it costs to acquire a customer, what that customer is worth, and whether the gap justifies the investment. The calculation most marketing reports skip.
When growth works against the business
Revenue goes up. Margin doesn't follow. Why scaling spend sometimes makes a business weaker, and what the structure should look like instead.
Cases from real audits
Anonymised breakdowns from businesses I've worked with. The gap between what the numbers looked like and what was actually happening underneath.
Marketing is a significant spend in your business and you can't clearly see what it's returning
Your reports are full of metrics but none of them connect to the P&L
You want to understand what marketing is actually doing to the business, not what the platforms say it's doing
Adela Mincea. Marketing Economist. 13+ years at the intersection of marketing and commercial strategy, across businesses in Dubai, London, Hong Kong, and Europe. I audit marketing performance for a living, where the spend goes, what it returns, and what the dashboards aren't saying. This newsletter is where I share what I find.
Know what your marketing spend is actually doing to the business.
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