Achilles heel of your media team 😨

Targets are fine. We set them. We report them.

Numbers aren’t supposed to impress you. They’re supposed to guide decisions. When they don’t, you’re not data-driven—you’re data-paralyzed.

Let’s call it what it is. Are you afraid of conversion data and attribution?

Not because you’re lazy. Not because you don’t care. But because questioning it feels dangerous.

There are usually two reasons.

First, you genuinely don’t know how conversions are set up. Events, attribution windows, primary vs secondary actions. It feels technical, messy, and easy to get wrong.

Second, you kind of know. Enough to feel uneasy. Enough to notice inconsistencies. But someone more senior than you once said, “This is all good.” 

So you have a choice.
Question it, or work around it.

And unbelievably often, teams choose the second.

We audit accounts all the time where media buying teams openly admit they don’t trust the numbers. Even worse, some don’t actually know which numbers matter for their business.

Not clicks.
Not platform ROAS.
Not blended dashboards pulled three days too early.

They don’t know what signal truly indicates growth.

So what is this behavior?

It’s a mix of authority bias and groupthink. A quiet agreement not to challenge a predefined setup because challenging it might slow things down, create friction, or expose uncomfortable gaps.

The roots are almost always the same.
Lack of trust.
Lack of openness.
Lack of willingness to ask the most basic foundational questions.

Instead, teams rush to optimize.
They enrich change history.

Not because it’s the right next step, but because doing work feels safer than questioning the foundation it sits on.

There’s also a harder truth.

Many media buyers are more focused on appearing competent in the eyes of the C-suite than being correct. So they get straight to execution. Fast. Visible. Impressive.

Even if the foundation is wrong.

Real confidence looks different.

It’s being willing to slow everything down and ask 100 uncomfortable questions before touching an optimization lever. It’s digging into the offer, the business model, and the actual success metric before opening the ads interface.

Optimization is not the job.
Understanding is.

#2: Decision-making paralysis

Every hypothesis is a good test.
Not every test will work.
But every test must generate learning. 

Because the moment money is attached to a test, learning stops being the goal. Appearing right becomes the goal.

This is why “safe” decisions dominate accounts.

Micro-optimizations.
Small bid changes.
Tiny budget reallocations that look responsible but don’t move anything.

It creates the illusion of control without the discomfort of real experimentation.

Learning gets sacrificed in favor of stability. But stability without learning is decay—it just takes longer to notice.

Teams stuck in decision paralysis aren’t indecisive. They’re fear-optimized.

And the fear isn’t abstract.

It’s the fear of ROAS screenshots in Slack.
Fear of short-term drops being treated as failure instead of process.
Fear of having to explain nuance to people who only look at green or red numbers.

But there’s an even deeper layer most people won’t admit.

It’s the fear of looking incompetent.

Not to the algorithm. To the team. To leadership. To the C-suite. To the person who might say, “Why did we do this?” with hindsight confidence and zero context.

So media buyers default to what feels defensible.

Because the decisions that create step-change growth are rarely obvious. They require conviction before proof. They require you to look wrong before you look right. And they require a team culture that understands that.

Most don’t.

So instead, media buyers optimize effort visibility. They optimize for being seen as “on top of things.”

#3: AI paralysis

AI didn’t create this problem.
It exposed it.

There are two ways media buyers get paralyzed by AI.

Scenario 1: You use AI way too much

We use AI way too much. To the point where we expect it to know our business better than we do.

Yes, you heard me right.
To know your business better than you.

And this usually comes from a very narrow, very dangerous belief: that a media buyer’s job lives inside Google Ads, Meta, or Merchant Center. That siloed view will get you nowhere.

A media buyer is not someone who “buys media.”

A real media buyer is someone who:

• discusses the funnel with you

• challenges you to think about new offers

• thinks about how to improve AOV

• pushes you to be agile in pursuit of goals

• insists on testing as a growth mechanism

And when I say testing, I do not mean switching from tROAS to tCPA.

I mean tests that shake your CRO team.
Tests that require new funnels.
Different funnels.
Uncomfortable ones.

Back to AI.

What I see constantly is this:
You forget your brain somewhere inside the Merchant Center. Adjusting attributes. Fixing feeds. Tweaking this and that. Your entire afternoon disappears into setup work.

Then, when it’s time to come up with a new PMax test, you write a beautifully polished prompt. You ask the AI model to imagine it is you. A world-class expert. And you copy the plan it gives you.

Very little thinking goes into it.
Because your energy is already gone.
Because Merchant Center “required” your afternoon.

So the part that actually matters—the thinking—you let a model do for you.

A model that doesn’t care if it works. Do you?

Scenario 2: You don’t use AI at all

The second paralysis looks different, but it’s just as limiting.

You don’t use AI because you believe you’re irreplaceable. And to be fair—being a good media buyer does require thinking. A lot of it.

But now your job requires 26 hours per day.

You’ll figure it out. You’re smart. You’ll work harder. You’ll manually connect dots that could’ve been organized for you in minutes.

This isn’t mastery.
It’s unnecessary friction.

Most people are trying to replace thinking with AI. I’m using AI to remove the manual parts so I can think better.

That difference is everything.

To sum this up…

Most media buying teams mistake activity for competence. They believe that as long as things are being adjusted, optimized, and reported on, value is being created.

It isn’t.

Real value comes from leverage—and leverage comes from insight. From asking the questions nobody wants to ask because they disrupt comfort.

If your media buying team can’t explain why something is working, they didn’t create it.
If they can’t defend a test before it runs, they shouldn’t be running it.
If they can’t challenge the offer, they don’t understand the business.

That’s the Achilles heel.

Not a lack of skill.
Not lack of effort.
Lack of authority to think.

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