{"type":"rich","version":"1.0","provider_name":"Transistor","provider_url":"https://transistor.fm","author_name":"Serious People Podcast","title":"Christina Johnson: How to Waste Less Money on Digital Marketing","html":"","width":"100%","height":180,"duration":2484,"description":"Christina Johnson has been shown a 33x return on ad spend and kept a straight face. She has sat with a retail media network selling hundreds of millions of dollars in advertising whose own sales team couldn't explain to buyers whether the money had worked. And she can point to a supplier that ran a flawless campaign in cities where the retailer has no stores.\n\nChristina Johnson spent years inside Walmart's retail media business before founding Advisar, an intelligence tool for retail media buyers. In this conversation, she and Noah break down why so many brands are flying blind on their ad spend, why a metric like ROAS can look great while sales go nowhere, and what happens when AI gives you a confident, completely wrong answer.\nIf your business runs any kind of performance marketing, this episode will change how you look at your own numbers.\nYou'll hear:\nWhy more ad spend rarely means better marketing\nHow a \"perfect\" campaign can drive zero real sales\nWhat questions to ask before trusting a marketing metric\nWhy AI can be confidently wrong, and how to catch it\nTimestamps: \n(00:00) More ad spend doesn't mean better marketing\n(00:34) Meet Christina Johnson, founder of Advisar\n(03:08) Why retail media is \"wildly backwards\"\n(08:37) The meeting where the sales team couldn't explain their own numbers\n(10:18) The question every retail marketer should ask\n(11:49) The auto-bid campaign that spent $0 and sold nothing\n(13:26) Why Christina built Advisar\n(15:18) The \"33x ROAS\" that wasn't real\n(18:11) ROAS explained, and why it can lie to you\n(19:09) Using Claude for analysis, and where it breaks\n(33:20) The AI mistake that changed how she builds\n(39:31) One thing to do tomorrow with your ad spend data\n\nResources:\nValet — Episode Sponsor\nValet is the founding sponsor of the Serious People Podcast.\n\nAI is getting very good at making useful things: dashboards, analyses, internal websites, and small tools. Making those things available to the rest of a team is a separate...","thumbnail_url":"https://img.transistorcdn.com/NxoMuCaL8mXunCKvOjnRkI-5gybrIUeofz2EwSDdIxE/rs:fill:0:0:1/w:400/h:400/q:60/mb:500000/aHR0cHM6Ly9pbWct/dXBsb2FkLXByb2R1/Y3Rpb24udHJhbnNp/c3Rvci5mbS8zZTQz/MDY2YWExNDY1MDhi/Njk3ZGE5YmIxNjI1/MTYxOS5wbmc.webp","thumbnail_width":300,"thumbnail_height":300}