--- title: "The Marketing Graveyard: Campaigns, Tools and Tactics That Should Stay Dead" date: 2026-10-26 author: "sallard" featured_image: "https://www.dacgroup.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/10/ShiftHappens-Episode22-BlogBanner.jpg" lang: en-ca translations: en: "https://www.dacgroup.com/insights/podcasts/marketing-graveyard.md" fr-ca: "https://www.dacgroup.com/fr-ca/perspectives/podcasts/cimetiere-marketing.md" en-gb: "https://www.dacgroup.com/en-gb/insights/podcasts/marketing-graveyard.md" --- # The Marketing Graveyard: Campaigns, Tools and Tactics That Should Stay Dead ## Listen now on your favorite platform - [![Apple Podcasts](https://www.dacgroup.com/wp-content/themes/dac/img/podcast/Apple.svg) Apple Podcasts](https://podcasts.apple.com/ca/podcast/inside-the-funnel/id1533975355) - [![Spotify](https://www.dacgroup.com/wp-content/themes/dac/img/podcast/Spotify.svg) Spotify](https://open.spotify.com/episode/56700KqFQHYTIpH099enxk?si=07b7a9d71ece4634%20) - [![Youtube](https://www.dacgroup.com/wp-content/themes/dac/img/podcast/youtube.svg) Youtube](https://youtu.be/qMqe4sYYgUw?si=zFuSexRnWXYetFDa%20) - [![Amazon music](https://www.dacgroup.com/wp-content/themes/dac/img/podcast/Amazon.svg) Amazon music](https://podcasts.apple.com/ca/podcast/inside-the-funnel/id1533975355) - Key takeaways - ![Your audience needs more than a backstory ](https://www.dacgroup.com/wp-content/uploads/2025/12/star.svg) Your audience needs more than a backstory Knowing that “Sarah, 34, loves oat milk” won’t tell you where to reach her. Build audiences using customer interviews, research, and media consumption data. AI can help speed up the process, but convincing personas still need evidence behind them. - ![Every channel deserves creative that fits ](https://www.dacgroup.com/wp-content/uploads/2025/12/star.svg) Every channel deserves creative that fits An ad made for a phone can look painfully out of place on a big screen TV. Keep the campaign idea consistent while adapting the format and message to each channel’s purpose. AI can help scale versions for local markets and promotions. - ![A glowing report still needs proof of impact ](https://www.dacgroup.com/wp-content/uploads/2025/12/star.svg) A glowing report still needs proof of impact Likes, impressions, and clicks can provide useful signals, but they don’t tell the whole story. Look beyond last-click attribution and use approaches such as incrementality testing to understand whether your media is making a meaningful difference to business results. - ![Your annual budget shouldn’t come with a tombstone ](https://www.dacgroup.com/wp-content/uploads/2025/12/star.svg) Your annual budget shouldn’t come with a tombstone Consumer behavior and media touchpoints keep changing. Your plan needs room to respond. Revisit budget decisions as evidence emerges and stay flexible enough to adjust how you reach your audience throughout the year. Episode Transcript Nasser: Welcome to Shift Happens, I’m Nasser Sahlool and today I’m joined by Bhavin Prashad, VP of media at DAC. Welcome, Bhavin. Bhavin: Thanks for having me. Nasser: Thank you for being here. Now, as anybody who is watching this on YouTube can tell, there’s something that might be a little bit unusual in our appearance today. Yes, thank you for noticing – new glasses! Yes, and we’re also wearing banana outfits, because that’s what we are willing to do for our company and for engagement. So when you reach a certain point in your career, those who are growing in their careers and they ask you to wear a banana outfit to help grow the company, you know you’ve arrived. You’re welcome. So, as you might have guessed, it is spooky season. So we’re heading into the marketing graveyard to visit the campaigns, tools, and tactics that should probably be dead. Think vanity metrics haunting the monthly report, personas assembled from workshop scraps, and the same campaign creative creeping across every channel. Some of these habits are hard to bury because they’re familiar or because they once worked. And now AI is entering the story. It can help marketers move faster, but it can also bring old mistakes back to life at scale. Today, Bhavin and I will talk about what belongs in the graveyard, what might deserve a second life, and how marketers can focus on real outcomes like sales, retention and customer action. So what’s the scary thing that we want to start with? Media audiences that are built on assumptions that can make a fictional persona look like a real customer. So Bhavin, talk a little bit about how that happens and why that could be a problem. Bhavin: Yeah, it’s something that we deal with a lot. So I think, you know, when you think about a persona, it can be essentially a made up character that we, you know, stand in for a customer, right? So it could be Sarah. She’s 34 years old. She loves oat milk. As a media person, I look at that and say, great. And that’s where it kind of stops, right? I think from a media execution standpoint, we need to know where is she on her commute? What is she consuming from a media standpoint… Nasser: Apart from oat milk? Bhavin: Apart from oak milk. Yeah. She’s consuming oat milk, but we can’t target her via oat milk unless we start buying milk ads, right? Which might be a little weird. But what matters to me as a media expert is, you know, where I can start to put ads in front of Sarah. Nasser: Okay. And how can AI exacerbate the problem of these kinds of fictitious personas that haven’t been completely fleshed out or thought out? Bhavin: Yeah, it’s a great question. I think, you know, we’re using AI to speed up a lot of processes. Persona and audience building is one of them. I think where we can start to deviate a little bit in the wrong direction is, you know, we’re not basing it on actual research and actual media consumption data. So AI can start to generate personas that, you know, may sound cool, but again, in actuality, we don’t have any real data points backed on research that we can implement media campaigns against. Nasser: Okay, so let’s shift gears into our next scary thing, which you tell me if it belongs in the graveyard or not. And that’s where I’m creative, right? It’s this idea of a single creative asset across all platforms, all sizes. I enjoy watching Prime TV on my big screen TV, and then getting ads that were clearly built for a mobile device served up to me. Bhavin: It happens. Nasser: So, explain a little bit about why that happens and why you think we need to kill it with fire. Bhavin: It’s a good question. So honestly, because it’s easy, right? Like, we end up pushing the same audience, the same creative and messaging, you know, one brief, one set of assets. It just feels efficient to do it that way. Right? But in reality, you know, we want to make sure that the idea is maintained, but then things are recut properly based on that channel. Nasser: So when you say recut, doesn’t that become cumbersome and unwieldy? And isn’t that why people don’t do it? Bhavin: Yeah, it’s a good point. I do think at the end of the day, every channel on a media plan needs to have a purpose. So even though that aspect of it might become cumbersome, I think where we can use AI to be efficient, that’s, you know, we should find ways to do that, but we can’t lose the core of the channel. So if the channel has a certain purpose, we’ve got to make sure that the creative and messaging is cut properly. Nasser: Okay. So from a formatting perspective, as well as even from, you know, the message itself. Bhavin: For sure. Yeah. So I would say, you know, as an example, right – We might have promotions running or local specific creative and messaging that you need to run. That’s a great use case where you can leverage AI at scale, right? But when you’re thinking about the actual message or you know how the brand is actually appearing and what that person is taking away, maybe video and higher impact media, it’s not a good look. Nasser: Okay. So continuing with our Halloween theme and what belongs in the graveyard, and I think this is one that I think is fairly non-controversial. And this idea of vanity metrics, last click attribution… Why are people still doing this? Bhavin: It’s a tough habit to get out of. I think, you know last click attribution, it can feel very real. So, you know, somebody clicks on an ad, they get to website. It’s a very easy process to understand. I think that’s really it, the simplicity of, of that type of path right? So when you start to look outside of last click attribution, it becomes a lot more complex, which is why people are maybe a little bit resistant. Nasser: So a potential stake through the heart of this type of attribution might be the zero click environment right? Where suddenly you’re losing a lot of the visibility in terms of traffic, you know, AI answers and overviews and so on. Do you think that that’s going to accelerate the death of this type of a metric, and if so, what replaces it? Bhavin: I hope so. I hope it’s the stake to the heart. I think in some places it’ll always, you know, play a little bit of a role. But I think in many cases as we start to look at, you know, helping clients and brands move more upper funnel and diversifying their media mix, moving away from a last click model is super important. In terms of what replaces that, we can think about things like incrementality testing, brand awareness studies… Really, for me it comes down to incrementality because that’s a real solid way to understand if something that we’re exposing to an audience is actually having some kind of an impact. So we’re trying to, you know, do as much of that as possible. Nasser: Okay. Quick fire round on the graveyard shift. So, bury, revive or it depends. Trading likes, impressions and click through rate like campaign success? Bhavin: Bury it. Nasser: Why? Bhavin: So, I mean a like is like a feeling. I like it, great. That’s awesome right? I think those things can, you know, show some kinds of lead indicators. But at the end of the day they’re not moving a business’ bottom line. Nasser: You’re clearly a popular kid at school if you can dismiss likes that simply. Bhavin: Yeah. That’s what happens when you wear banana costumes. Nasser: Using customer interviews to shape media audiences? Bhavin: I think that one’s a revive. We might want to bring that one back. Nasser: Why? Bhavin: It’s authentic. It’s real. I think, you know, shaping media audiences and persona targeting from things that we can spin up through AI. It doesn’t feel as real, like the oat milk example, right? Bhavin: So we know Sarah drinks oat milk, great! I think real customer stories tells us what we can really know about a customer. I was reading a couple of reports like Work has some great studies with TikTok and nine out of ten, you know, audiences that were derived from their methodology, were really showing things around that persona that led media campaigns to be deployed in a certain way, and then half of them ended up missing the boat on what that customer actually was. Nasser: Okay, keeping budgets fixed for the full year. Bhavin: Got to bury that. Nasser: Why? Bhavin: So I think staying fluid and staying nimble is important. Especially in today’s day and age, where there are so many different places that a consumer can, you know, interact with media, there’s so many different touchpoints. So from a media execution standpoint, you really have to stay on your toes. Nasser: Says the man in the banana outfit. Bhavin: Yeah, with no toes. Nasser: So thank you very much for that. Tonight we walked through the marketing graveyard and found a few familiar ghosts. Metrics without meaning, plans carved in stone, and campaigns built for convenience instead of customers. The good news is that marketers don’t need garlic or a silver bullet. They need a clear business goal, a real understanding of their audience, and the willingness to adjust when the evidence points somewhere else. AI can help, but only if we give it the right job now. Now make it happen. Follow Shift Happens, leave us a review and share this episode with your team. You can find more of DAC’s media work at DACgroup.com. If you have questions for the podcast, email us at [email removed]. We’d love to hear from you! Bhavin, thanks for helping us decide what belongs in the graveyard and what deserves to alive. Bhavin: Thanks for having me. Nasser: Thanks for listening. I’m Nasser Sahlool, and you’ve been listening to Shift Happens. Let’s get social! 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