Brand, Positioning & Category Design
A founder-oriented guide to brand vs demand generation for startups — reframe the next-dollar decision as a diagnosis of the current GTM bottleneck, not a fixed budget split or fake marketing benchmark. Educational; not legal, tax, accounting, valuation, or investment advice.
Starting June 1, 2026, Google Ads keeps hourly, daily and weekly reporting data for 37 months, monthly, quarterly and annual data for 11 years, and reach and frequency metrics for 3 years (policy verbatim). After that, the data is no longer accessible via the Google Ads interface or APIs. Build a calm export habit now — Google Ads Scripts or the API into Sheets or BigQuery — before any reporting baseline you depend on ages out.
On May 5, 2026, OpenAI announced a beta self-serve Ads Manager for ChatGPT with CPC bidding alongside CPM. Treat your first campaign as a controlled test, not a growth claim: prepare the landing page, the offer and the measurement plan, pick CPC or CPM deliberately, keep budgets small, and use OpenAI’s Conversions API or pixel for post-click events. This tutorial walks the workflow without inventing benchmarks.