The cynical position of the numbers people is that marketing is the department that buys ads and delivers leads.
Brand, memory, trust, warmth, the feeling that this company is the one you call when something is on fire - yes, yes, the usual incense. Bring sales or get out.
Then the measurement started dictating the work. That is the whole tragedy. It fits in a sentence.
If you own a P&L, or you sit on a board that “holds marketing accountable,” this is the accountability you actually bought.
What Is Easy to Count Colonises What Matters
Clicks are easy. Leads are easy. Attributing a sale to the last ad the customer saw is easy in the way a streetlight is easy: it is where the drunk looks for keys.
What makes a customer comfortable with you, trust you, and seek you out when they are not in-market this week? Complicated. Unfashionable. Possibly true.
If you did something this year that will help sales next year, that is your problem. Because you cannot prove it in the approved attribution model. What did not happen immediately is not credited to you. Life is hard, darling.
A discount that produces a sale today looks effective even if the customer would have paid full price. A brand that lets you charge more for years? Can you guarantee it? In this quarter? With a pixel?
So marketing ceases to be the function that understands customers and makes the organisation smarter. It becomes ads that convert or ads that do not. That’s it. That’s the job now.
The Sentence Almost Nobody Is Allowed to Say
Almost nobody in the meeting says: for the newsletter to convert at the rate and volume we need, we have to put a lot of work in the world so that more people know us, care, and trust us when they finally need us.
They say: if the content does not produce leads, it is a waste. It is inefficient.
Notice the smuggle. “Efficient” has been defined as “produces a lead in the window we already chose.” The window was chosen by people who do not get paid for next year’s pricing power. The definition did the murder. The dashboard only held the coat.
Last-Click Is a Theology
Last-click attribution is not a measurement. It is a religious claim: the last thing we paid for caused the sale.
It is wonderful for media buyers and fatal for brands. It systematically over-rewards the closer and under-rewards the years of work that made the close possible. It is the doorman fallacy in a media plan: define marketing as “the last touch,” then fire everything that is not a last touch.
The discount looks rational under this theology. Why invest in being wanted when you can rent being chosen, this afternoon, with a coupon? Because rented demand does not compound, and it trains customers to wait for the coupon. You have not built a brand. You have built a habit of not paying.
The numbers people are not wrong that creative departments can hide in fog. Some “brand work” is indeed a holiday with better catering. The error is the overcorrection: if it cannot be attributed this month, it is not work. That rule does not make marketing honest. It makes marketing small.
What a Grown-Up Board Asks Instead
Not “how many leads.” That question is allowed. It is not sufficient.
Ask:
- What do we believe must be true of memory and trust for next year’s conversion rates to be possible - and where is that in the budget, as a first-class citizen, not as leftovers?
- Which sales this quarter would have happened at full price? If you cannot estimate, your “performance” includes cannibalised margin dressed as growth.
- What is the last-click model structurally blind to? Name it. Fund it on purpose, or admit you have chosen not to.
- If we cut the unmeasurable work for twelve months, what breaks in month thirteen? And who will still be in post to own it?
If the CMO cannot answer without incense, that is a CMO problem. If the CFO will not allow an answer that is not a lead, that is a governance problem. They are not the same problem. Boards keep mixing them up because the second one comes with charts.
Marketing is not a charity. It is also not a vending machine. Treat it as a vending machine and you will get a very efficient path to a company nobody was looking for. Until they needed a discount to remember the name.
- Why the numbers people almost always defeat the visionaries
- The efficiency report that hides the damage
- How to move your company’s work onto your customers (satire)
- The doorman fallacy
- Leads versus the brand you cannot count
- Goodhart’s Law
- The quarter versus the decade
- A KPI audit for boards
If your board wants marketing accountability that does not accidentally delete the brand, that is a design problem, not a slogan. Contact me.