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The Voltage Research Series
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The Voltage Research Series

How Voltage thinks.

Research, frameworks, and operating principles from two decades of growing consumer brands. Not tips. Not content. The ideas we actually run accounts on.

Marina del Rey. Photo: Alfonso Betancourt / Unsplash.

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Lighthouse Paper No. 01

Why We Sometimes Tell Companies Not to Hire Us

The most expensive client you'll ever sign is the one you should have never signed.

Mark R Brown, Founder, Voltage Media5 min read

Latest research

Operator Playbook

Why Most Google Ads Audits Miss the Real Problem

Rising CPA has three causes, demand ceiling, creative fatigue, and audience exhaustion, and the fix for each is the opposite of the others. A field guide to diagnosing CPA before you act.

7 min read→
Operator Playbook

Not All ROAS Is Equal: A Field Guide to Attribution Inflation

An 8x ROAS on view-through remarketing is not an 8x on click-only prospecting. How attribution windows inflate ROAS by up to 45 percent, and the one report that tells you which number you actually have.

8 min read→
Positioning

Why AI Won't Replace Great Agencies

AI compresses detection, reporting, and synthesis. It does not replace the differential diagnosis, judgment, and taste that decide which move is right.

9 min read→

Before you hire another agency

Ask yourself three questions.

  1. 01Is our acquisition engine fundamentally healthy?
  2. 02Do we actually know where growth will come from?
  3. 03Are we optimizing marketing, or building a business?

If you can't confidently answer all three, that's where our Growth Readiness Assessment begins.

Start a Growth Readiness Assessment