Stop Letting Dead Campaigns Haunt Your Roadmap
Guest commentary on MediaPost
Osnat Lidor · September 2, 2026 · 3 min read
"We tried that three years ago and it didn't work." If you have spent any time around B2B startups, you have heard it. It sounds like experience. It is usually just a comfort-zone-approved excuse.
Three years is a lifetime in tech. Your product, market, buyers, and tech stack have all changed. The campaign that failed in 2022 was run with different tools, different messaging, and probably different customers. Treating its failure as permanent evidence is like navigating with an iMac G3: fun to look at, useless for today's workload.
The real problem is cultural, not tactical. When boards demand efficient growth, failed tests feel existential. Teams learn to avoid risk instead of managing it. Channels get banished to the "never again" pile, customer acquisition costs climb, and growth stalls while phantom fears run the strategy.
The fix is not to "be bolder." It is to make experiments so small and fast that nobody needs to be brave. Modern tools let you spin up micro-experiments, test messaging on small segments, and gather real behavioral data in days — without six-figure budgets or six-month agency commitments.
In this guest commentary for MediaPost, I break down why dead campaigns haunt roadmaps, how to spot the ghosts in your boardroom, and what first-principles testing looks like when you stop letting three-year-old failures become strategic dead weight.
Guest post
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Read the full postWritten by Osnat Lidor
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