New Blog Posts - Paolo Provinciali

Why Can’t We Fully Automate Media Yet?

By Paolo - Sunday 2nd February, 2025

Too many variables: audience shifts, inconsistent metrics, and creative impact. Automation optimizes, but strategy needs human inference. The challenge is balancing tech efficiency with smart decision-making.

Last week, a colleague hit me with a question that seemed incredibly simple on the surface: If we know the drivers of impact and the KPIs that influence them, why can’t we automate 99% of media planning, buying, and optimization? It’s not even AI, just basic automation. I had to pause. Not because the question wasn’t valid—but because a…

Balancing Risks: Hedging Bets in Marketing and Corporate Strategy

By Paolo - Tuesday 20th August, 2024

The other week, I came across this AdWeek article about Nike’s marketing team’s restructuring, which inevitably piqued my interest. The article linked to a post by Massimo Giunco, former Nike Brand Director, who shared his take on how Nike’s CEO, John Donahue, and Nike’s President of Consumer, Product and Brand, Heidi O’Neill, decided to enact a series of changes between August 2020 through March 2021 to eliminate all categories from the organization, focus entirely on D2C (direct-to-consumer) divesting from wholesale, and shift the marketing model to prioritize digital content generation over brand narrative. According to Giunco, going all-in on this strategy led to record-low performance over the last few quarters, and now that the market cap is at its lowest since 2018, the company is reversing its approach.

While it’s somehow evident that Massimo Giunco has personal issues with Nike’s leadership, his narrative allows us to draw a parallel with the question we often grapple with: how can we invest in something that may yield long-term value like brand building but doesn’t offer good short-term measurability or certainty for success?

Four Ps

By Paolo - Wednesday 27th March, 2024

Anyone with a Business or Marketing degree has likely heard of the following framework from the illustrious marketing professor Philip Kotler.

Marketing is the combination of the 4Ps: Price, Product, Promotion, and Place.

While many can agree with it, when we think of Marketing in most companies and business circles, we tend to focus on a subset of one P: Promotion.

If you reacted to the previous sentence by thinking, “Yeah, that’s kind of true,” you may be interested in taking a few minutes to think if your Marketing team is doing everything it’s supposed to do in your company.

Controversial Marketing Hot-Take #1

By Paolo - Monday 15th January, 2024

In October last year, I thought of starting a series of posts on 𝗰𝗼𝗻𝘁𝗿𝗼𝘃𝗲𝗿𝘀𝗶𝗮𝗹 𝗺𝗮𝗿𝗸𝗲𝘁𝗶𝗻𝗴 𝗵𝗼𝘁 𝘁𝗮𝗸𝗲𝘀. I posted one a day for four days straight. This was the first one. "𝙄𝙛 𝙮𝙤𝙪𝙧 𝙘𝙖𝙢𝙥𝙖𝙞𝙜𝙣 𝙗𝙤𝙢𝙗𝙨, 𝙞�…

Incentives and Leverage

By Paolo - Sunday 29th October, 2023

“Give me a lever long enough and a fulcrum on which to place it, and I shall move the world.”
Archimedes

How do you get things done in your professional life? Simple: understand the incentives and find the leverage.

In the early part of your career, as an individual contributor, you can exceed expectations and gain leverage by being incredibly good at your job. You may do it with your skills and talent or by working harder than others.

Later in your career, though, being great at your job is not enough. You need the intuition to see an untapped opportunity beyond your day-to-day job (a.k.a. “white space”) and the ability to seize it.

It’s no longer an individual matter. Even if you have the vision for company-wide improvement and a clear articulation of its value, the people you need may have no incentive to help you.

When this happens, you may need more leverage to make your needs their priority.

Misaligned incentives are pervasive in corporate environments, and they are usually a combination of suboptimal management decisions and a complex business environment. Over the years, I learned not to let them frustrate me, but use them to my advantage.