Media is a science. Practise it like one.

Media Scientist is my working notebook as a digital media professional: measurement, analytics, tag management, and search - the place where marketing's received wisdom gets tested against evidence.

Read the writing

What is media science?

The folklore problem

Digital marketing runs on confident claims: best practices nobody has tested, attribution models mistaken for ground truth, dashboards that measure activity instead of effect. Much of it is folklore - passed between agencies and conference stages until repetition makes it feel true.

The scientific alternative

Media science treats every campaign, tag, and ranking theory as a hypothesis. Instrument it properly, test it where you can, and be honest about uncertainty where you can't. Some cherished tactics survive that treatment. A surprising number don't.

What I write about

Four beats, one discipline

📐

Analytics & measurement

GA4, attribution, incrementality, and the difference between what dashboards say and what actually happened.

🧪

Tag management & data infrastructure

GTM, consent mode, server-side tagging, and the unglamorous plumbing that decides whether your data is worth analysing.

🔍

Search & AI discovery

SEO as it collides with AI answers: what still ranks, what gets cited, and how discovery is being rebuilt in front of us.

🧭

Media strategy

Budgets, channels, and planning decisions - approached as experiments with costs and error bars, not articles of faith.

When you can measure what you are speaking about, and express it in numbers, you know something about it; when you cannot measure it, when you cannot express it in numbers, your knowledge is of a meagre and unsatisfactory kind.
William Thomson, Lord KelvinPopular Lectures and Addresses, 1883

The method

Every post on this site holds itself to the same loop

  1. Ask a falsifiable question

    Not "is our marketing working?" but a question the data could actually answer no to.

  2. Instrument it honestly

    Tagging, consent, and collection choices decide what you can know before any analysis starts. Get the plumbing right or the conclusions are decoration.

  3. Run the test

    Experiments where possible, quasi-experiments where not, and clearly-labelled judgement where neither is available.

  4. Let the evidence decide

    Write down what the result was, including when it is inconvenient, and update the playbook instead of the story.

Start in the archive

New writing lands as it clears review - the archive is the best place to begin.

Browse all writing