Press Release: Silverback Strategies CEO Neil Welsh Speaks at Senior Living Executive Conference on How AI Ad Platforms Are Misdirecting Marketing Budgets

Silverback Strategies

June 2, 2026

Welsh challenges senior living operators to confront the gap between platform-reported performance and real occupancy growth — and offers a 30-day playbook to close it.

Leesburg, Virginia (May 19, 2026) Neil Welsh, Founder and CEO of Silverback Strategies, delivered a presentation at the Senior Living Executive Conference (SLEC 2026) in Nashville, Tennessee on May 19, 2026. His session, “AI Is Wasting Your Marketing Budget and Stalling Your Occupancy Growth,” addressed one of the most urgent and least understood challenges facing senior living operators and marketers: how AI-powered ad platforms are misallocating marketing dollars and what to do about it.

Welsh walked a room of senior living executives and marketing leaders through how platform AI, including Google Performance Max and Meta Advantage+, is designed to find the cheapest conversions, not the most valuable ones. The result: platforms systematically take credit for move-ins that would have happened without paid advertising, while underreporting the performance of channels that actually drive net-new occupancy growth.

Welsh presented Silverback client data illustrating just how wide that gap can be. Platform-reported cost per acquisition on branded search campaigns overstated performance by as much as 5x compared to the true incremental cost. A Demand Gen campaign the same client was considering cutting told the opposite story: the platform made it look nearly 4x more expensive than it actually was. The team was one quarterly review away from killing their best channel and scaling their worst.

Welsh grounded the problem in a broader measurement crisis. Deloitte’s 2025 CMO Survey found that 64% of CMOs cite proving marketing’s value to the business as their top challenge. In senior living, that gap shows up as a familiar but costly disconnect: agency reports signal strong digital performance while occupancy growth tells a different story. Welsh also addressed the scale of AI-driven media fraud, citing a 2023 Juniper Research study projecting $84 billion in digital ad spend lost to fraud in 2025, rising to $172 billion by 2028, with AI ad systems amplifying the problem by learning from fraudulent conversion signals.

“Senior living operators are getting a distorted picture of their marketing performance, and the platforms have no incentive to correct it. The AI is doing exactly what it’s designed to do: find the cheapest conversions. The problem is that cheap doesn’t mean incremental. You need to know whether your marketing is driving move-ins you wouldn’t have gotten anyway. Right now, most operators have no idea.”

— Neil Welsh, Founder & CEO, Silverback Strategies

Welsh closed with a three-part playbook operators can begin executing in 30 days: eliminating waste by adding brand exclusions to Performance Max and deploying bot detection; activating platform AI with higher-quality signals through Conversion API integration, offline conversion tracking, and CRM data feeds; and measuring incremental growth through incrementality testing and marketing mix modeling to surface which channels are actually moving the business.

The full presentation slides are available for download here.

To learn more about Silverback Strategies and its performance marketing services, visit www.silverbackstrategies.com.

Silverback Strategies is a performance marketing agency built for growth-focused teams that need to move fast and prove impact. The agency’s integrated services span paid media, performance creative, measurement, SEO, AI search, and content, all built to drive growth and align organizations around what’s working, what’s not, and what’s next.

Silverback has managed more than $500 million in media spend and runs 1,000+ marketing experiments annually, an approach that has produced a Net Promoter Score 38% above the industry average. The agency’s workplace culture has been recognized by Ad Age, Inc., and The Washington Post, and founder Neil Welsh was named to DIGIDAY’s Top Bosses list. Learn more at www.silverbackstrategies.com.