We're all losing the thread when it comes to marketing incrementality.

What I'm talking about are the hushed, reverent tones everyone's taking when posting about how complicated and sophisticated one's measurement must be to resolve "causality". Whole soliloquies litter LinkedIn about the magical powers required to know whether an ad 'caused' someone to buy something vs. when an ad was shown to someone who was going to buy anyway. Fawning prose compels advertisers to laud ad platforms who share 'incremental' measurement options as true gifts from tech gods. In totality, a narrative has emerged that markets these capabilities as deeply sophisticated and benevolent, ones we should celebrate and revere.

I have news for you. There's nothing special about being able to measure incrementality. Your kindergartner learns it. Everyone else in the world of business has had to do it as their only form of measurement for...ever.

If you manufacture 1,000 widgets a year, and after opening your company's second factory, you are still manufacturing 1,000 widgets a year, you don't have any sophisticated measurement questions. You've got a fucking problem.

And every idiot at the company knows it - they aren't wondering "but how do we test that the new factory didn't CAUSE some widgets..."

If you're the sales director for a dealership that sells 50 cars a month, and you hire 10 more sales people, and afterwards you are still selling 50 cars a month, you won't be asked by the owner to do a two-tailed T-test. The only random walk you'll be asked to take is one out the door.

You can screen out who's serious about helping your business grow and who's got utterly no clue by who's doing the most 'woo woo'ing about measuring the simplest thing in the whole world to measure when it comes to marketing.