Brenden pushed blended ROAS from 3 to 6. Three months later revenue was falling, and nobody could explain why.

Stella co-founder Brenden Delarua on incrementality testing, geo holdouts, and why a strong ROAS can hide what actually drives revenue. Brenden spent about 11 years buying paid media before co-founding Stella, a causal measurement platform that runs structured geo holdouts to separate the revenue advertising causes from the revenue it just takes credit for. ROAS and CPL measure correlation, not cause, and optimizing toward them can quietly defund the demand that was funding the account.

In this episode:

• The QBR where his record ROAS and the CFO's real numbers said opposite things
• What annual revenue you need before a holdout is worth running — $10M D2C, $50M lead gen, $100M B2B
 ...