Track 02
Takes
Opinions, teardowns, and the occasional disagreement with the industry. Short, argued, and wrong out loud rather than vague in private.
Google Ads AI Max migration: a small-account checklist before 1 OctoberGoogle is moving campaign-level broad match and Automatically Created Assets into AI Max in September, in place and with no way back. Neither Google's +7% nor smec's 35% lower ROAS measures what that does to your account: a small account should narrow its scope, check five settings, and let a holdout on its own bookings decide.
HelloFresh failed the market test at €7 billion, then passed itBernstein put HelloFresh's lifetime value to acquisition cost at 0.8x in 2022: it was paying more for a customer than the customer paid back. That is the margin-back budget's failure condition, at €7 billion of revenue rather than €180 a contract. The correction was the model's own prescription: fix the inputs before buying more leads.
Quibi had no bad case at allQuibi raised $1.75 billion, projected more than 7 million subscribers in year one, and shut down after six months with about 500,000. The detail that matters is a word: in investor presentations, 20 million subscribers was the base case. When the base case is the good case, the bad case is missing by construction.
Peloton published the good case and called it the planIn August 2021 Peloton guided $5.4 billion, no range, no bad case. It cut in November, cut again in February, and closed the year at $3.58 billion, 34% below the first number. Each cut was received as a betrayal because no scenario existed for it to land in. The same equation runs inside a company, pointed at its own forecasts.
Cyberpunk 2077 shows what expectation debt costs, itemisedEight million pre-orders covered the whole cost of the game before a single review. Eight days after launch Sony delisted it and refunded buyers, and the shares fell 43% from their peak. Expectation debt is the only zone where a product is a commercial success on day one and a liability by day eight.
Disney runs the beatable band as a daily operating systemJoin a 60-minute queue at Walt Disney World and you will very likely be out in 40. Independent measurement puts actual waits at 55 to 71% of posted times, averaged across the four parks. That is a promise set at bad-week delivery, and a surplus handed to every guest at a cost of zero.
Domino's lowered the bar, then cleared itIn December 2009 Domino's told the public its pizza was bad, and same-store sales rose 14.7% the next quarter. Read through one equation, satisfaction equals delivery minus expectation, the campaign was not honesty for its own sake. It moved the promise below the pizza.
Expectation management case studies: six brands, one equationThe most-cited turnarounds and collapses of the last fifteen years were expectation events, not product events. Six cases with public numbers show the same arithmetic that runs a €2,000-a-month campaign for a dental clinic.