Rodrigo: Thank you so much for sharing your concern.

For your “performance marketing” spend, if your POI is negative – IE you are actively losing money on the initiatives that are supposed to actively make money – have a discussion with your CFO. It might take two paths: A. Kill it. You are supposed to be making us a profit. B. Keep losing money, we are trying to accomplish Goal X for the business, so another year of losing money is ok.

Lose money after getting permission to lose money. Focus your attention while losing money on if Goal X is being accomplished.

For your “brand marketing” spend, you won’t use short-term POI to assess if those “upper funnel” campaigns are successful or not. You’ll start with BLS in the short-term, move to CLS in the medium-term, and MMMs in the long-term < All of this you will also expose to your CFO. All good. I hope this is helpful.

Telling companies to immediately kill anything with negative POI sounds clean in theory, but in practice it has quietly killed growth for many brands that needed scale first and margin later. Not every business is a mature e-commerce with perfect COGS visibility.

This hyper CFO-centric view is becoming a dangerous trend… it gives people permission to murder brand building, awareness, and experimentation in the name of ‘accountability.’ The result? Teams optimizing to not lose money this quarter… while slowly losing market share.

Accountability matters, sure. But turning it into a religion while pretending attribution is reliable and LTV is predictable is just another sophisticated form of analytical vanity.

Sometimes cheap activity is exactly what you need to feed the funnel. Killing it just because the POI is red today is as naive as celebrating low cost per session.

Rich: Thank you so much for catching my image upload error.

All fixed now.

-Avinash.

Looking 150 to 200 years out, the psychological implications of high-fidelity AI simulations—what some call the “Simulation Singularity”—tend to fall into three heavy categories:

1. The Erosion of “Objective Reality”
If an AI can render a simulation indistinguishable from reality, the human brain (which evolved to survive physical threats, not digital ones) loses its anchor.

The “Truman Show” Paranoia: A persistent psychological state where users begin to doubt the authenticity of every interaction.

Solipsism Syndrome: The feeling that only one’s own mind is sure to exist. In a world of AI-generated companions, the “Other” becomes a line of code, leading to a profound sense of isolation despite being surrounded by “entities.”

I found the recommended Media Plan to be particularly helpful. This is not what we are getting from our global Agency. Their emphasis is still heavy (60%) on what you are calling Blaze. We are going to revisit this immediately.

The other mantra I took away: “why now.” It is an immense challenge for any creative director, and a difficult one to solve.

Thanks.