CribThis resolves conflicting marketing research, debunks vendor mythology and hands you verifiable takeaways — a Crib — with the original source receipt attached. No paraphrased stats. No vendor blog telephone game.
Each vertical is a sortable decision matrix: impact, consensus, evidence strength, effort.
How AI engines actually pick citations
What econometrics says about pipeline
Checkout psychology and promotion math
Why memory beats targeting
Loyalty, LTV and churn, honestly
Incrementality over attribution
What the algorithms actually reward
Crib of the day
Myth:Small brands can win by being unusually loyal.
Evidence:Double jeopardy: smaller brands have both fewer buyers and slightly lower loyalty — an empirical law observed across categories and decades.
Receipt: Byron Sharp, Ehrenberg-Bass Institute — How Brands Grow
Ranked by expected business impact weighted by evidence strength.
The Validity Gap
Myth:A big enough A/B test or attribution platform can pin down each campaign's ROI.
Evidence:Across 25 large field experiments with major U.S. retailers and brokerages, the median confidence interval on ad ROI was over 100 percentage points wide; individual-level sales are so volatile (coefficient of variation ~10) that an informative test often needs 10M+ person-weeks.
The Validity Gap
Myth:TV's ROI estimates justify current spend levels.
Evidence:Estimating elasticities and ROI across 288 brands, Shapiro, Hitsch & Tuchman find ad elasticities far smaller than the published literature suggests, negative ROI at the margin for more than 80% of brands, and positive overall ROI for only about a third.
95:5 Rule
Myth:Your entire B2B budget should chase in-market buyers.
Evidence:At any moment only ~5% of business buyers are in-market; the other 95% are future buyers who must be reached now to be remembered later.
Attribution
Myth:Last-click attribution is a fair scorecard.
Evidence:Large-scale field experiments show branded search and retargeting capture credit for conversions that would have happened anyway; last-click can overstate paid value by an order of magnitude.
Budget Allocation
Myth:Performance marketing should get the majority of budget.
Evidence:Across hundreds of IPA case studies, roughly 60% brand / 40% activation maximises long-term profit growth in consumer categories.
How Advertising Works
Myth:If ads don't move this week's sales, they didn't work.
Evidence:Across 751 short-term and 402 long-term elasticities from 56 studies (1960-2008), the average short-term advertising elasticity is 0.12 - but the mean long-term elasticity is 0.24, double the short-term, through carryover.
One crib in your inbox every Monday. No spam, unsubscribe anytime.