Sleeping Barber - A Marketing Podcast

Fresh off the Omar Roubi interview, Marc and Vassilis sit down for the PostPod to work through what stuck.
The uncomfortable one: when the business is broken, whose job is it to stop advertising? Target Canada ran full advertising cycles, back to school, holiday, the works, while shelves sat empty and the experience fell apart. So the spend did not just fail to help. It amplified a promise the business could not keep. "Expect more, pay less" landed as "expecting more, paying more."
They get into the reflex every marketer knows: use it or lose it, and the maturity it takes to hand budget back and say the problem is upstream. Plus leading versus lagging indicators, why revenue tells you far too late, and how supply chain efficiency and customer sentiment map onto physical and mental availability.
They also sit with the thing that keeps pulling them back: it was not one P, it was the clock. A lease deal and government hiring timelines built a manufactured pressure that eroded the quality of every decision after it. Nordstrom entered around the same time with a slower playbook and lasted longer.
No clean verdict. A much better set of questions.
Enjoy the show!
Chapters
00:00 Doomed from day one
00:38 PostPod: debriefing Target Canada
00:52 A case study that keeps giving
02:40 Going all in, and Nordstrom's different path
04:05 Canada's geography vs three warehouses
05:41 Whose job was it to say "stop advertising"?
07:49 Use it or lose it: should marketing give budget back?
08:14 Shared accountability and deferred blame
10:56 Leading vs lagging indicators
12:08 The promise to the customer
13:49 Mapping mental and physical availability
14:13 The price problem: priced premium, wasn't
16:08 You can't isolate one P: the clock
17:00 Making quality decisions under pressure
19:28 Why extremes are the best teachers

Target is a company people love. More than 1,700 stores, a brand with real pull. Then it came to Canada, lost billions, and walked away inside four years.
This is a story about Big and Little marketing. Little is the advertising. Big is everything else: product, price, place, and how the whole business organizes around the customer. Roger Martin says a promise has to be memorable, valuable, and deliverable. Advertising makes it memorable. Price and place make it valuable. Product makes it deliverable. In Canada, Target's ads were excellent, and the business broke the promise anyway.
CPA Omar Roubi joins Marc and Vassilis to reverse engineer the collapse through the four Ps. Omar teaches this case at the University of Colorado Denver and built a definitive audio case study on it at LumiQ. He also lived it: his wife moved from Texas to help launch the Toronto-area stores.
Inside: the Zellers real estate deal that started the countdown, empty shelves sitting above full back rooms, the imperial vs metric mix-up, three distribution centres across a 6,000 km country, and why the famous $5.4B loss is mostly a writedown, not operating losses.
A case study in why great marketing can't save a broken business.
Our Guest:
Omar Roubi - https://www.linkedin.com/in/omar-roubi-cpa-texas/

Chapters:
00:00 Cold open: one bad decision begets more
00:26 Big marketing vs Little marketing
02:16 Omar Roubi returns
03:14 The personal connection: launching Target in Toronto
06:14 "Too big to fail"
06:36 The accountant's takeaway
09:22 Place: the Zellers real estate deal
12:08 Wrong locations, wrong customer
18:47 The 12-month countdown clock
22:25 Product: empty shelves, full back rooms
25:02 Physical availability and the metric mix-up
32:46 Price: "expect more, pay less" meets three warehouses
41:05 The currency headwind
45:07 The $5.4B loss vs the $200M operating loss
48:27 Little marketing: is ROI the wrong number?
53:01 The apology videos, and brand vs performance
57:04 The one number that signals trouble first
1:00:07 The human cost: 17,600 people

References:
References
CBC News. (2011, January 13). Target buys Zellers leases for $1.8B. https://www.cbc.ca/news/business/target-buys-zellers-leases-for-1-8b-1.981132
CBC News. (2012, July 6). Target wins approval to come to Canada. https://www.cbc.ca/news/business/target-wins-approval-to-come-to-canada-1.1160485
Castaldo, J. (2016, January 1). The last days of Target. Canadian Business. https://canadianbusiness.com/ideas/the-last-days-of-target-canada/
Kumar, N. (2025, September 2). The experience paradox: Why better satisfaction scores don't always mean growth. Kantar. https://www.kantar.com/north-america/inspiration/experience/the-experience-paradox
LinkedIn B2B Institute & WARC. (2024, August 13). Making a promise to the customer: How to give campaigns a competitive edge. https://business.linkedin.com/advertise/resources/b2b-institute/making-a-promise-to-the-business-customer
Roubi, O. (Host). (2021, August). The rise and fall of Target Canada [Audio podcast]. LumiQ.
Strauss, M. (2013, April 5). Target Canada prices 0.2 per cent higher than Wal-Mart's: Survey. The Globe and Mail.
Strauss, M. (2014, September 22). Target Canada winning price battle with Wal-Mart. The Globe and Mail.
Target Corporation. (2011, January 13). Target Corporation to acquire interest in Canadian real estate from Zellers Inc., a subsidiary of Hudson's Bay Company, for C$1.825 billion [Press release]. https://corporate.target.com/press/release/2011/01/
Target Corporation. (2015a, January 15). Target Corporation announces plans to discontinue Canadian operations [Press release]. https://corporate.target.com/press/release/2015/01/
Target Corporation. (2015b, January 15). Form 8-K. U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission. https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/0000027419/000002741915000005/
Zellers Inc., Hudson's Bay Company, Target Corporation, & Target Canada Co. (2011, September 12). Amended and restated transaction agreement [Exhibit 2(a) to Form 10-Q]. U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission. https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/0000027419/000110465911066091/

Marketing runs on comfort blankets. The Sharp Cut cuts them up to see what's inside. This week, we did it as a murder mystery.
The victim: the click. Once upon a time a click was one honest fact, a machine noting that a file left a building. Over eleven years it got poisoned, dose by dose, until it was taking credit for sales it never caused.
The body: in 2012, eBay turned off roughly $51M in paid search across a third of the US, with matched control markets. Scored the way a dashboard scores it, the return was over 4,000%. Scored against the control, the only way that actually answers the question, it was minus 63%. Same company, same spend, same year.
Then we line up six suspects, the auction, the platforms, last click attribution, the CFO, the agency, and us, and ask each one the same two questions: did they have a reason, and did they have the access?
Marc and V get out of the costume for the part that stings: the doses we added ourselves. The Sport Chek war room. The machine V built to move money faster. The P&G cut everyone quotes that fails our own evidence test. And what happens to the click when the shopper is an AI.
We won't hand you a verdict, because we don't fully agree.
You're the jury.
Enjoy the show!
Chapters:
00:00 What the Sharp Cut is
00:49 A murder mystery: who killed the click?
01:30 Meet your six suspects
01:45 The body: eBay turns off $51M in paid search
03:35 4,000% ROI or minus 63%? Same campaign, two scores
03:57 What a click actually was (the first banner, 1994)
05:23 The 44% click rate nobody can verify
06:25 Cause of death: poisoned over eleven years
06:42 Three doses: price, bouncer, then credit
08:43 When a measure becomes a target (Goodhart's Law)
09:09 Whodunit: motive and opportunity
11:21 The evidence: Facebook's own 2016 deck
12:45 Out of the costume: the doses we added ourselves
15:28 The Sport Chek war room18:16 Building a machine to move money faster
19:41 The P&G $200M cut, and why it fails our own test
20:49 The alibi that holds: same test, opposite answer
21:27 The click's replacement: AI shoppers
22:39 The verdict is yours
24:06 One warning before you turn anything off
Sources:
Allouah, A., Besbes, O., Figueroa, J. D., Kanoria, Y., & Kumar, A. (2026). What is your AI agent buying? Evaluation, biases, model dependence, and emerging implications of agentic e-commerce. In Proceedings of the ACM Web Conference 2026 (pp. 8697–8700). https://doi.org/10.1145/3774904.3792943
Blake, T., Nosko, C., & Tadelis, S. (2015). Consumer heterogeneity and paid search effectiveness: A large-scale field experiment. Econometrica, 83(1), 155–174. https://doi.org/10.3982/ECTA12423
Chan, D. X., Yuan, Y., Koehler, J., & Kumar, D. (2011). Incremental clicks: The impact of search advertising. Journal of Advertising Research, 51(4), 643–647. https://doi.org/10.2501/JAR-51-4-643-647
Golden, J., & Horton, J. J. (2021). The effects of search advertising on competitors: An experiment before a merger. Management Science, 67(1), 342–362.
Gordon, B. R., Zettelmeyer, F., Bhargava, N., & Chapsky, D. (2019). A comparison of approaches to advertising measurement: Evidence from big field experiments at Facebook. Marketing Science, 38(2), 193–225. https://doi.org/10.1287/mksc.2018.1135
Lewis, R. A., & Rao, J. M. (2015). The unfavorable economics of measuring the returns to advertising. The Quarterly Journal of Economics, 130(4), 1941–1973. https://doi.org/10.1093/qje/qjv023
Lysen, S. (2013). Incremental clicks impact of mobile search advertising. Google. https://research.google/pubs/incremental-clicks-impact-of-mobile-search-advertising/
Simonov, A., Nosko, C., & Rao, J. M. (2018). Competition and crowd-out for brand keywords in sponsored search. Marketing Science, 37(2), 200–215. https://doi.org/10.1287/mksc.2017.1065
The Procter & Gamble Company. (2017). Additional definitive proxy soliciting materials (DEFA14A). U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission. https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/0000080424/000119312517299631/d464866ddefa14a.htm
Facebook. (2016). Everything competes with everything [Slide presentation].
GoTo.com, Inc. (1999). Form S-1 and Form 10-Q. To be reformatted as SEC legal sources.
Nielsen. (2009). NetEffect CPG home scanner panel meta-analysis of 200+ online campaigns. As reported in Facebook (2016).
Nielsen. (2015). BrandEffect meta-analysis of 478 online global campaigns, October 2014 to April 2015. As reported in Facebook (2016).

Marc and V are back with the Barber's Brief: the good, the bad, and the overhyped from the last couple of weeks, with data, a few strong opinions, and Great Creative getting the last word.

This week:
"My CEO doesn't get brand." Nearly half of B2B marketers say they can't get brand budget signed off. But 40% admit brand isn't seen as delivering ROI inside their own company. V's take: that's not an education gap, it's a proof gap. Fix the proof and the understanding follows.
Google AI Overviews are eating your website traffic. Studies put the click drop anywhere from 15% to 90%. Marc makes the case that we never owned our search rankings anyway. We've always been playing on rented land, and the landlord just changed.
QR codes in ads. Andrew Tindall of System1 says if you're still using them, you're a moron. CTV scan rates have fallen to 0.004%. V argues the QR code isn't the disease, it's the symptom. It is measurement theater and a confession that you don't trust the ad to do its job. Marc pushes back, and it gets good.
Nobody owns demand. A sharp post from Mats Georgson: who decides what you sell, to whom, at what price, and where. Rarely marketing. So what should marketing actually own?

Plus Ad of the Week: Tubi's funeral spot from "Find Any Feeling For Free," the funniest ad with the weakest branding you'll see all month.
Enjoy the show!

Chapters
00:00 Intro: welcome back to the Barber's Brief
01:11 Story 1: "My CEO doesn't get brand"
02:07 Education gap or proof gap?
04:05 The B2B Institute evidence: brand as the icebreaker
05:53 Story 2: Google AI Overviews are eating your traffic
07:23 Playing on rented land, again
09:34 Own your audience, or just change landlords?
12:12 Story 3: QR codes, Andrew Tindall, and measurement theater
15:07 Marc's rebuttal: signal vs noise
18:01 Last click is dumb, so why do we default to it?
20:04 Story 4: Nobody owns demand
22:54 You don't own the four Ps, but stay close to them
25:08 Ad of the Week: Tubi, "Find Any Feeling For Free"
27:06 The gag that outran the brand
29:31 Coming up: Who Killed the Click, and Target Canada

Links:
Title: ​ Lack of CEO understanding harming B2B brand building push
Link: https://www.marketingweek.com/brand-spend-b2b-ceo-cfo/
Title: Google AI Overviews Are Eating Your Website Traffic. Here’s How To Get That Traffic Back
Link: https://www.forbes.com/sites/terdawn-deboe/2026/05/18/google-ai-overviews-are-eating-your-website-traffic-fight-back/
Title: Andrew Tindall: If you’re still putting QR codes in your ads, sorry, you’re a moron
Link: https://www.thedrum.com/opinion/andrew-tindall-if-you-re-still-putting-qr-codes-in-your-ads-sorry-you-re-a-moron
Title: Nobody in your company owns demand.
Link: https://www.linkedin.com/posts/matsgeorgson_nobody-in-your-company-owns-demand-ask-activity-7505219391089983488-BoMM?utm_source=share&utm_medium=member_desktop&rcm=ACoAAASDjbUB2U9VXn6rXo3lEfvMAwrkF_01wlk
Ad of the Week
Title: Tubi Fakin' It 30s
Link: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TGklD2yU-3I&t=30s

Fresh off the Ian Whittaker interview, Marc and Vassilis sit down for the PostPod to unpack what actually stuck.
The through line: marketing keeps losing the budget argument because it treats finance as an obstacle instead of a customer. Ian's framing reframed it. Follow the incentives. Understand what executives are rewarded and punished for. Reframe budget as risk, not just missed opportunity. And stop leaning on "ROI" as if the word alone wins the room, because it is a ratio you can improve simply by cutting spend.
They also get honest about the echo chamber marketers live in, the gap between how advertising works and how people believe it works, and why infinite data and AI still have not cracked proof. Marc brings it down to earth with a personal lesson from running a real P&L.
No tidy answers. A much better set of questions.
Chapters:
00:00 The board is a customer too (cold open)
00:41 PostPod: why our heads were spinning
02:22 Follow the incentives, the question we never ask finance
03:12 Marc runs a P&L now, and cost is a worthy adversary
05:07 Marketing's echo chamber problem
06:10 Finance is the customer: vocabulary vs grammar
07:16 Learn capital allocation, not just the buzzwords
09:42 Why leading with ROI can get you cut
10:27 How advertising works vs believing how it works
11:40 Understand board priorities before you pitch
12:53 Infinite data, still can't prove ROI, enter DCF
15:05 The bridge and the ravine
16:45 Getting marketers closer to the business