Unfiltered returns from a spell on the sidelines with guest Erez Levin — speaker, writer and co-author of a major new paper on media quality — alongside hosts Justin Lebbon and Ian Whittaker. The conversation opens on the state of the ad market and a strong earnings backdrop, then digs into the core question: in a world of unlimited impressions, how do you know what you're buying, and why does quality matter?

Highlights:

A two-tier ad market. Ian on the macro: 85%+ of S&P 500 companies beating earnings estimates, blended q1 growth pushing nearly 30% — the strongest quarter in around five years. Traditional advertisers growing mid-single digits, with the SME market still driving the platforms.
The consumer signal is mixed. Weak US consumer confidence, but PepsiCo cutting prices up to 15% and McDonald's flagging pushback — yet recession fears have repeatedly failed to materialise across 2024, '25 and '26.
The "quality trifecta." Erez frames marketing effectiveness as media quality, creative quality and audience/data quality — with the paper focused on media quality specifically.
Quality is a range, not a binary. Why Erez prefers "quality" to "premium," built around attention (prominence of placement) and context (user receptiveness — e.g. a McDonald's ad before vs. after dinner).
The race to the bottom. Billions going to muted videos in the bottom corner labelled as "in stream" ads, bought at the same price as full-screen sound-on inventory because buyers don't check.
Finance vs. marketing. How marketing trained finance teams to expect ever-lower CPMs — and why that metric is now used against marketing's own case. Cost is not what matters; value is.
Clock science vs. cloud science. Erez on treating marketing as deterministic when it's probabilistic, the move from multi-touch attribution toward econometrics and experimentation, and the death of the cookie-era illusion.
Beyond averages. YouTube as the case study — the top 5% as high quality as the best TV, but "the exception, not the rule." The fix: pricing on a few qualitative dimensions (time of day, channel/show, geo) rather than channel-level averages.
Transparency vs. quality. They're different things — high quality media can be opaque — but buyers increasingly need to validate what they're paying for.
Will the big three move? Justin presses on three platforms taking ~90% of new spend with little incentive to change. Erez: only their incentives will move them; build a parallel quality path for the enterprise buyers who care.

Key takeaways

All impressions are not created equal — the paper's first principle and the foundation for assessing media quality.
Quality isn't binary or the same as 'premium'; it's a range driven by attention (placement prominence) and context (user receptiveness).
Buyers routinely overpay, paying the same CPM for muted, bottom-corner 'in stream' video as for full-screen sound-on ads — and often don't check.
Marketing trained finance teams to chase ever-lower CPMs, and that metric is now used against marketing; the fix is to argue value over cost and account for long-term brand building.
Channel-level averages hide huge quality variance (e.g. YouTube's top 5% vs. the rest); price on a few qualitative dimensions like time of day, show type and geo instead.
The big three platforms won't move first — only enough buyer dollars demanding quality will change their incentives, so build a parallel quality path for enterprise marketers.