Most marketing teams are working harder than ever: running campaigns across more platforms, producing more creative, tracking more metrics… and still feeling like something isn't adding up. The platforms say the numbers look great. The CFO is asking why it isn't showing up in revenue. The creative team is churning out variations. And somewhere in the middle, the strategy gets lost.

In this episode of Connecting the dots, I sat down with Jan Montwill, Global Media Strategist at H&M, to untangle 3 questions that are bothering a lot of marketing leaders right now: why following platform best practices might actually be working against your brand, what good measurement really looks like when you can't trust any single platform to tell you the truth, and whether the industry has quietly deskilled itself without anyone quite admitting it.

Jan has spent his career on both sides of the media relationship: across 3 agencies, including WPP and Havas, and now as a senior strategist at one of the biggest advertisers in Europe. That dual perspective gives him something most guests don't have. He knows exactly how agencies think, how platforms sell, and how to push back on both. He's not guessing at any of this from the outside. And the thread running through everything he says is the same: the moment you stop owning the inputs (the strategy, the measurement, the creative thinking), you're optimising for someone else's business, not yours.

Here's what we covered in Part 1, and what you can take away from it.

The platform paradox, defined

Jan coined the phrase himself, and it's worth sitting with: platforms genuinely want to help you. But they want to help you for their own good. No shade, that’s just how business works. 

Every major platform (Meta, Google, TikTok) publishes best practices, offers creative feedback, and has teams dedicated to your account. And genuinely, their advice is useful. But it's worth remembering that their primary objective is keeping users engaged and happy on their platform (that’s their business, after all), which means the guidance they give you is naturally shaped by that lens. When they recommend against a big logo in the first two seconds, or suggest more native-feeling content, they're optimising for what works in their ecosystem. That's not a criticism, it's just how it works. And knowing that changes how you use the advice.

The risk isn't that the advice is wrong. It's that following it uncritically means you're feeding their business first and yours second.

Jan's framing is deliberately balanced: this isn't about being anti-platform. It's about knowing whose interests are in the room when you're being given a recommendation.

Best practice is a floor, not a strategy

One of the clearest tensions Jan names is around creative volume. Platforms often recommend producing many ad variations to help the algorithm learn, reduce ad fatigue, and stay fresh. The logic sounds reasonable.

But Jan pushes back on several assumptions here. First, ad fatigue is massively overstated. As he puts it, it takes an extraordinary amount of exposure for a normal person (someone who doesn't work in marketing) to actually get tired of an ad. Marketers convince themselves audiences are watching their ads far more attentively than they are. The more likely problem is underexposure, not overexposure.

Second, spreading budget across dozens of variations means no individual ad gets enough weight to tell you anything meaningful. You end up with a lot of assets and no learning.

His practical suggestion: take the budget you would have spent on producing variation after variation, put it into working media behind one strong creative, and run it for longer than feels comfortable. You'll almost certainly see better results.

Brand distinctiveness isn't optional, even in performance channels

Platforms often encourage brands to go unbranded: content that feels native, organic, influencer-like. And on some metrics, it performs better. Ads without prominent branding tend to get higher engagement rates because they don't feel like ads.

But Jan draws a clear line between engagement and the actual job of advertising, which is to make your brand stick in someone's mind so they choose you when they're standing in a shop or browsing online. Engagement without attribution to your brand is just entertainment.

The answer isn't to ignore platform guidance entirely. It's to get smarter about brand assets. You don't need a logo slapped in the first frame, but you do need something that says this is us without needing words. He points to Netflix's sonic cue as the textbook example: before a single frame of content plays, you know exactly who made it.

Packaging, colour, visual language, sonic identity: these are the tools. Most brands haven't developed them to the point where they work across platforms without a logo doing all the heavy lifting.

Measurement is the foundation underneath everything

The reason the platform paradox is so hard to escape is that most teams are measuring their results with platform data. And platform data, by design, shows each platform at its best. Every channel claims credit. The numbers always look good.

Jan's view is that independent measurement isn't a nice-to-have: it's the operating system. At H&M, that means a combination of marketing mix modelling (MMM) for long-term strategic direction and regression-based attribution (RBA) for shorter-term signals. The two together give a picture that no single platform dashboard ever could.

He's clear-eyed about the cost barrier. MMM with a partner like Kantar isn't accessible for most brands. But your agency almost certainly has econometric capability, and if you're not using it, you're making budget decisions without a foundation.

The principle is the same regardless of scale: you need at least one independent source of truth. If the only thing validating your media spend is the platforms being spent on, you're measuring their business, not yours.

What this means if you're not H&M

Jan flagged this himself: several of his reference points (dedicated global measurement teams, 50-person agency setups, direct platform relationships) reflect a scale most brands will never reach. But the principles don't require that scale.

If you don't have a direct platform relationship, your agency does, and that's your access point. If you can't run a full MMM study, most agencies offer something equivalent. If you can't produce 2,000 creative variations, that's actually a competitive advantage: it forces the discipline of backing fewer, stronger ideas with real budget.

The gap between H&M and a mid-size brand isn't in the logic. It's in the resources available to execute it. The strategic thinking is the same.

How to apply this to your strategy

Everything Jan covers in this episode connects back to the same idea: platforms can't think for you, and the teams that win are the ones who stay in control of what they bring to the table. Here's where to start:

• List 3 things your team does because the platform recommended it. Ask honestly whether those practices make your brand look identical to every competitor in your category.
• Check your measurement setup. Are you relying solely on platform-reported data, or do you have an independent view of what's actually driving growth? If you can't answer confidently, that's where to start—before any conversation about AI or new channels.
• Audit your brand assets. If you removed your logo from your ads, would anyone know they were yours? If not, that's a creative strategy problem worth solving now.
• Resist the volume trap. More ad variations is rarely the answer. More budget behind fewer, better ideas usually is.

Part 2 of this conversation is coming soon — we go into the skills gap that's opened up inside marketing teams, what AEO actually means in practice, and what Jan thinks the most dangerous thing marketers have stopped knowing how to do is.

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