Michael KaminskyMarketing Science | Causal Inference | Incrementality

The Counterfactual Problem Hiding in Every Marketing Report #marketing #shorts

Name: The Counterfactual Problem Hiding in Every Marketing Report #marketing #shorts
Uploaded: 2026-04-28T13:01:42+00:00
Duration: 1 min 24 s
Channel: Michael Kaminsky
Description: In this short monologue, Michael Kaminsky explains that every marketing result is fundamentally based on a comparison between the observed world—where a…

28 Apr 2026 · 1 min

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In this short monologue, Michael Kaminsky explains that every marketing result is fundamentally based on a comparison between the observed world—where a campaign was run—and an unobservable counterfactual world—where the campaign was not run. He describes the counterfactual as the missing reality that would have existed without the marketing effort, and points out that all measurement techniques (geo tests, A/B tests, statistical models) are attempts to reconstruct that unseen world. Kaminsky draws a parallel to clinical trials, where a control group serves as the counterfactual for a drug’s effect, emphasizing that without such a comparison we cannot attribute outcomes to the intervention. He concludes that marketing measurement faces the same causal inference problem, but with messier data, fewer clean controls, and high financial stakes.

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Every marketing result you've ever seen is built on something that never happened. What do I mean? Imagine two identical versions of your business. The same day, the same customers, the same market. In one world, you ran a marketing campaign and sales went up. In another world, you didn't run the marketing campaign. That second world, the one without the campaign, it creates something called a counterfactual. And the gap between these two versions of reality is how we think about the causal effect of your marketing. The problem here is obvious. You only get to live in one of these worlds. The moment you ran your campaign, the other world, it disappears from existence. You can never observe what happened if you hadn't run that campaign. So every marketing measurement method, every geo test, every model, every A/B test, really implicitly you're doing the same thing. You're trying to reconstruct the world you didn't get to live in. What would've happened if not for the marketing campaign. To glean from another domain, this is exactly why clinical trials have a control group. Half the patients get the drug and the other half get a placebo. The placebo group is the counterfactual. It's the closest thing science has to the world where nobody took the drug. Without it, you just have people who got better and would be left with no idea if it was the drug that did anything. Marketing measurement is trying to solve the very same problem, but with messier data, fewer controls, and a lot of money on the line. Whether in marketing or medicine, the question is never just what happened, it's compared to what.