Most $250K MMM engagements deliver a budget reallocation slide the marketer who paid for it can't defend. Four questions — base vs incremental, channel ROI with CIs, response curves, and holdout validation — separate serious modeling from a forecast in a lab coat.

The 3:1 LTV:CAC benchmark came from mature SaaS at steady state — it wasn't built for the companies quoting it most. Here's the three-gate model that replaces it, and the worked example where a healthy-looking 4.4:1 collapses to a marginal 1.4:1.

Somewhere right now, a head of growth is walking into a quarterly media review with a slide that says retail media delivered an 8x ROAS. Sam's Club MAP just shipped the first retail-media incrementality report honest enough to make that meeting uncomfortable — and three questions you should bring to your next RMN review.