Writing · The Marketing Blind Spot

Brand versus performance is the wrong fight

Tue, 13 Oct 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Every marketing team has had this argument, and most are still having it. Brand or performance. Long or short. The split, and where to move it this quarter.

The debate has run for years and it never resolves, because the question itself is wrong.

Brand and performance are not two camps competing for the same budget. They are two levers on the same thing: what a customer costs to win, and what that customer is worth once you have them.

Start with what each one actually does.

Performance captures demand that already exists. Someone is in the market, searching, comparing, ready to move. Performance puts you in front of them at that moment and converts. It is measurable, fast, and honest about what it did. It is also capped. It can only harvest the demand that is already there. It cannot create more of it.

Brand creates and shapes demand before the search begins. It decides whether the buyer thinks of you at all, whether they arrive already half-convinced, and whether they reach for price to manage their risk when they get there. None of that shows up by Friday. All of it changes the economics of every deal that follows.

Now put both on the only page that matters: the cost to win a customer, and the value of one over their lifetime.

Brand lowers what it costs to win a customer. A buyer who already knows you needs less convincing. The sales cycle is shorter. Conversion is higher. The discount is smaller, because they are not pricing in the risk of an unknown. Every one of those is a line in your cost of acquisition, and brand pushes all of them down.

Brand also raises what a customer is worth once won. Familiarity and preference show up as retention, as pricing power, and as the referrals that bring the next customer in cheaper still. That is lifetime value, and brand lifts it.

Performance does neither. It converts, efficiently, the demand that brand and the market already created. That is valuable work. It is not the same work.

So the two are not rivals. One sets the price of winning a customer and the size of what they are worth. The other collects the result. Run them against each other and you optimise this quarter’s cost per lead while quietly raising the structural cost of every customer you will ever win.

Here is why the fight feels real anyway.

Your dashboard can see performance and cannot see brand. The last click takes the credit. The paid line reports by Friday. Brand shows up nowhere a finance director can point to, even as it does the heavy lifting that made Friday’s result possible. So in every measurement, brand loses. Not because it did less. Because the measurement was built to see one and not the other.

That is the blind spot. You are not weighing two investments against each other. You are weighing one you can measure against one you have decided not to.

The way out is not to pick a side. It is to change what you measure.

Stop judging a pound by the channel it went into. Judge it by its effect on the ratio of what a customer costs to what a customer is worth, over the time that ratio actually plays out. Measured that way, brand and performance stop competing for the same line in the budget. They start being judged on the same outcome, the only one the business cares about: are you winning customers worth more than they cost, and is that gap widening or closing.

Do that and the argument dissolves. You stop asking whether to fund brand or performance. You start asking what each is doing to the economics of a customer, and you fund accordingly. Sometimes that means more brand, because your cost to win is climbing and no amount of bidding will fix it. Sometimes it means more performance, because there is demand on the table you are leaving there. The answer moves. The question, at last, is the right one.

Brand versus performance was never the fight. It was the symptom of measuring the wrong thing. Fix the measurement and the two go back to what they were always meant to do, together: making a customer cost less, and be worth more.

Why you keep losing the brand argument

Sat, 19 Sep 2026 00:00:00 GMT

You’ve made this case and you’ve lost it. Probably more than once.

Brand matters. It shortens the sales cycle. It makes the sales team’s job easier. It builds something that lasts beyond this quarter.

All true. And it loses to a paid search budget every single time, because the paid search budget can show what it did by Friday.

The problem isn’t that finance doesn’t understand brand.

It’s that you’re arguing the wrong side of it.

Every brand case I’ve ever made, and I’ve made plenty, argued the upside. Invest in this and here’s what you’ll get. Awareness. Consideration. Preference. Eventually, growth.

Put yourself in the finance director’s chair and look at that. They’re being asked to spend money now for a return that arrives in two or three years, can’t be isolated when it does, and is described in words that don’t appear anywhere in their accounts.

They’re not being difficult when they defer it. They’re doing their job.

So stop arguing the upside. Price the absence instead.

Here’s the thing nobody says out loud. A business that isn’t well known is already paying for it. Every month. It just isn’t written down anywhere as a brand cost.

Four places it shows up.

Deals take longer. When the buyer hasn’t heard of you, every conversation starts from nothing. More meetings, more time, more of your sales team tied up in one deal.

You discount more. A buyer who can’t tell whether you’re any good uses price to manage the risk. That discount comes straight off your profit on every deal it closes.

You lose more. Deals go to the company the buyer had already heard of, before your sales team ever got in the room.

Every lead costs more to convert. Unfamiliar prospects need more chasing, more content, more nurturing to reach the same point.

Three of those four push up what it costs to win a customer. The fourth pulls down what that customer is worth once you’ve won them.

And every one of them is already in your systems.

How long deals take is in the CRM. How much you discount is in the deal records. Win rates are in the monthly report. Margin is in the accounts.

Nobody has to believe in brand for any of that to be true. It’s just arithmetic on data you already have.

What that does to the conversation.

You’re no longer asking a business to fund something it can’t measure. You’re showing it a cost it’s already paying, in this year’s money, using its own figures.

That’s a different meeting. It’s also a meeting the finance director wants to be in, because you’ve brought them a number rather than a request.

One thing to be careful about, and I’d say this to anyone using it.

You can work out what weak brand is costing today. You can’t promise how much of that a particular campaign will recover.

Don’t claim you can. The first client who measures it will find out, and you’ll have handed them a reason to distrust the whole thing.

What you can say is this: here’s what the current position costs, here’s where we’re starting from, and here’s the number we’ll be judged on in a year. That’s more than any brand case has ever offered, and it’s honest.

Why I care about this more than the creative argument.

I’ve killed good work for feeling unserious and I’ve lost budget for work that would have paid. Both of those were my fault, and both came from the same place: I couldn’t put a number on it, so I argued about taste instead.

Taste is an argument you lose to anyone more senior than you.

A number isn’t.

Six questions before you hire a fractional CMO

Fri, 18 Sep 2026 00:00:00 GMT

You’re about to hire a fractional CMO, and nobody in the room is going to question it.

The logic is too clean. You need the experience, you can’t carry the salary, so you buy it by the day. Two days a week of someone who’s done it before, for a fraction of what a permanent hire would cost.

Then the plan arrives.

And the plan is always the same plan.

This isn’t a piece about fractional CMOs being bad at their jobs. Most of the ones I know are good, and some are very good. It’s a piece about what you’re actually buying, which is usually not what you think.

Six questions. Ask them before you sign, because afterwards they sound like an accusation.

1. Will this role own price and proposition, or only promotion?

Pricing is the strongest single lever on company profit there is. Fewer than fifteen per cent of businesses let marketing anywhere near it.

So think about what you’re setting up. Someone comes in two days a week. No headcount. No authority over price, product or who you sell to. And a revenue target.

They’ll pull the only lever you left them.

Campaigns.

Then everyone acts surprised.

2. Which of my numbers will my finance lead validate first?

Marketing marks its own homework nearly everywhere. That’s not a scandal, it’s just what happens when nobody else is looking.

BCG found that businesses where marketing and finance genuinely agree on how things are measured unlock financial improvements of twenty to forty per cent. They also found that only seven per cent of companies could say who was actually accountable for marketing return.

Seven.

So ask which number gets checked by someone outside marketing, and when. Before you sign, not after.

3. What happens in month thirteen?

Fractional engagements are short. Marketing effects are long. Nobody involved wants to raise it.

The Effie and System1 analysis of 1,265 campaigns found the biggest gains came from work that ran beyond two years, and that brands which kept changing creative direction produced weaker, blander, less recognisable work each time they did it.

Three fractional hires across three years is three restarts.

Every one of them will report a good quarter.

4. What would you need to see before you propose anything?

This is the one that tells you most, and it works because they’ll answer it honestly. They won’t know it’s a test.

Watch which way they reach.

Reach for an audit, a competitor scan and a website review, and they’re going to sell you activity.

Reach for what a customer costs you to win, and what that customer is worth once you’ve got them, and they’re thinking about your money.

Almost everyone reaches for the audit. It isn’t a character flaw. It’s what the training produces.

5. What stays in my business on the last day?

There are two possible endings here and they’re very different.

One: you own the cost of buying a customer, broken down by channel. You own what that customer is worth, in numbers your accountant will accept. You own a measurement that keeps running after the consultant has gone.

Two: you own a campaign calendar, three supplier contracts and a habit.

Put the answer in the contract. Then watch the room while you say that.

6. When would you tell me to spend less?

A retainer pays for continuation. Everybody involved understands this and nobody says it.

So ask the question that costs them money.

Anyone willing to tell you to cut spend in a segment that’s losing you money is arguing against their own renewal. Which is exactly why the answer is worth having.

While you’re there, ask how many other clients they’re carrying this month.

Now the part that isn’t about them.

I’ve been on the other side of this. I’ve had the revenue target and no authority over price, product or hiring, and I did what anyone does in that position. I optimised the only thing I was allowed to touch and I reported on it enthusiastically.

The fractional CMO market didn’t appear because marketers got worse. It appeared because the permanent role became impossible to defend.

Marketing spent thirty years measuring itself with numbers borrowed from sales. Leads, pipeline, influenced revenue, attribution. It worked well enough until finance got sophisticated enough to ask whether the pipeline would have arrived anyway, and at that point the whole measurement framework had no answer.

A role you can’t evidence is a role you eventually buy by the day.

So the fractional CMO isn’t the problem. They’re the consequence.

Which means the six questions are really only one question, asked six ways.

Are you hiring someone to run marketing, or are you hiring someone to find out whether your marketing pays?

Those are different jobs. The second one is harder to sell, harder to buy, and the only one that changes anything.

Ask which they’re offering. Most won’t have been asked before.

Dull is expensive

Sat, 12 Sep 2026 00:00:00 GMT

You know the meeting.

Someone brings work with a character in it, or a joke, or a film that doesn’t mention the product until the end.

The room goes quiet in a particular way. Nobody says it’s bad. What they say is that it feels unserious. Our buyers are technical. They’re evaluating a platform, not a soft drink. They want proof, specifications, a case study with a number in it.

So the work gets made safe. The character goes. The film turns into a product demonstration with music underneath. The headline explains a capability.

It survives the review. It goes out. Nobody remembers it a week later.

I’ve been the person who killed that work. More than once.

At the time it felt like rigour. Like the grown-up call.

What I didn’t understand is that the decision has a price, and it doesn’t turn up anywhere near the decision.

Because nobody remembers the advertising, the business has to buy its way into every conversation instead. Bid on the search terms. Buy the lists. Extend the sequences. Send the sales team in cold, deal after deal, and discount to close.

All of that lands in the accounts as cost of acquisition. None of it is ever traced back to a creative choice somebody made two years earlier.

The opposite of emotive isn’t rigorous. It’s forgettable. And forgettable has a price.

Now it’s measurable, which changes the argument.

Andrew Tindall’s analysis for Effie Worldwide and System1 links the Effie database of campaign outcomes to System1’s emotional measurement of the same campaigns. 1,265 campaigns, across the US, UK, Ireland and Europe, between 2007 and 2023, covering roughly $140 billion of category revenue.

Within the subset where return data could be matched, 147 campaigns, the finding is blunt.

The dull ones returned $4.40 for every dollar invested.

The least dull returned $7.10.

A penalty of about forty per cent, coming not from a smaller budget or a weaker offer, but from work that made people feel nothing.

And then the finding that removes our exemption.

When the categories are ranked by emotional neutrality, which is what dullness actually is, B2B sits among the dullest. Alongside pharmaceutical and financial services.

The usual explanation is that this reflects the audience. Serious buyers, serious category, serious work.

The data suggests it reflects us. As Adam Morgan puts it in the same study, categories aren’t dull. Only marketing is.

Related work by System1 with the IPA puts the mechanism in the language finance uses. Advertising with high emotional neutrality needs materially more spend to shift market share by the same amount as advertising that provokes a response.

Dullness doesn’t just underperform. It invoices you.

You end up buying what emotional work would have earned.

The best argument against me is Salesforce, so let me deal with it.

Anyone using Salesforce to argue for brand investment has a problem. They’re one of the heaviest spenders on acquisition in enterprise software. Sales and marketing has absorbed something like forty to fifty per cent of revenue across most of their history, well above their peers, and they’ve never pretended otherwise.

If you’re looking for evidence that brand makes acquisition cheap, it isn’t there. The filings say the opposite.

So the claim worth making is a different one.

Brand didn’t make Salesforce’s acquisition engine cheap. Brand is what made an expensive acquisition engine rational.

The ratio has two sides, and almost every argument about marketing efficiency only ever discusses one of them. A business can spend heavily to win a customer and still be sound, as long as that customer is worth enough, stays long enough and buys enough afterwards to carry the cost.

That second side is what they worked on, for twenty-five years. How long customers stayed. How much they bought later. How little discounting it took to win them. How much of the selling an entire ecosystem did on their behalf.

Judged as a cost line, the spend looks indefensible. Judged as a ratio, it looks like capital allocation that worked.

Which is the whole point, and it’s why this matters beyond the creative argument.

A weak brand raises what it costs to win every customer. Dull work raises what it costs to be remembered at all.

Both are costs of absence. Neither appears as a line in your accounts. Both get paid, every month, through the cost of acquiring customers.

That’s why they stay invisible. Nobody’s hiding them. There’s just nowhere in the reporting for them to show up.

Until somebody works out the ratio, and then they’re the first thing you see.

Six signs your marketing is costing more than it brings in

Sat, 05 Sep 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Every one of these gets blamed on something else. Bad leads, a tough market, a sales team that can’t close. And every one of them shows up years before anything appears in the accounts.

I’ve worked in eight of these businesses. Different sectors, different sizes, different decades.

The same six conversations happened in every single one.

For a long time I assumed that was just what working in B2B was like. A set of permanent frictions everybody complains about and nobody fixes, in the way every office has a printer nobody can work.

It took me an embarrassingly long time to notice they weren’t six problems.

They’re six symptoms of one problem, and they all point the same way.

Here they are, in the words people actually use.

“The target’s gone up again and it feels harder than last year.”

Targets go up. That’s normal and nobody’s arguing with it.

What’s worth noticing is the effort. If you’re winning customers profitably, a bigger target needs proportionally more activity. Ten per cent more target, roughly ten per cent more work.

When each customer costs a bit more to win than last year, or returns a bit less, the extra effort isn’t proportional. It’s steeper. And it gets steeper every year, quietly, while everyone puts it down to a tougher market.

The sales team feels it first. Management usually reads it as a motivation problem.

“Sales says the leads are rubbish. Marketing says sales can’t close.”

This argument is in every business I’ve ever worked in, and it’s never resolved, because both sides are partly right. That’s what makes it permanent.

Here’s the bit underneath it. When it starts costing more to win a customer, the instinct is to get more leads into the top. So targeting widens and qualification loosens.

More leads arrive. A smaller share of them convert. So you need more leads again.

The cost goes up. The argument gets louder. Round it goes.

Diagnosed as an execution problem, the answer is more volume, which makes it worse.

“We’re having to discount a bit more to get deals over the line.”

Cycles lengthen, the pressure to close builds, and discounting is the nearest tool.

A deal planned at forty per cent margin closes at thirty-two. The revenue target is hit. It books as a win, and by every measure anyone is looking at, it is one.

But what a customer is worth to you is built on margin, not revenue. That customer is worth materially less than the one before, and the reported numbers won’t show it.

Repeat it across enough deals and the economics move a long way while revenue and customer count sit perfectly still.

“Churn’s within tolerance.”

Probably true, and it’s the wrong question.

The rate tells you how many left. It doesn’t tell you who.

If the ones leaving are disproportionately your best, or if they’re going before they’ve repaid what it cost to win them, a healthy churn rate is describing an unhealthy business.

Replace good customers with adequate ones for long enough and your average customer value falls year after year while churn holds steady.

That’s the most invisible of the six, because the number people watch stays green.

“New logos are a bit flat, but the base is growing nicely.”

Expansion revenue is real and it’s good, and it can carry a business for years.

What it also does is let the acquisition engine rust without anyone noticing, because nobody’s looking at it while the top-line number goes up.

Then the expansion runs out, as it eventually does, and you go back to the market to win new customers. And you find it costs far more than it used to, and you’re not as good at it as you were.

Flat new logo growth alongside growing revenue isn’t a neutral signal. It’s a bill arriving later.

“Marketing’s budget is the first thing we look at when it’s tight.”

Of course it is. It’s the most visible discretionary line on the cost base.

So it gets cut. Activity drops, pipeline slows, sales pressure rises. Marketing defends itself with impressions and leads and campaign ROI. Finance isn’t convinced, because none of that answers the question they’re asking.

Next quarter it gets cut again.

Everyone calls this a relationship problem between the CMO and the CFO. It isn’t. It’s a measurement problem. A function that can’t say what a pound of acquisition spend returns will lose that argument every time, no matter how well it’s actually performing.

What I’d want you to take from the six.

Every one of them is routinely diagnosed as an execution problem. Try harder, hire better, run a workshop, fix the handover between sales and marketing.

Every one of them is the same thing underneath. It’s costing more to win a customer than it used to, or each one is worth less than it used to be, and usually both at once.

And here’s the part that matters. All six of these show up years before anything appears in the accounts. Revenue, EBITDA, budget variance and churn are all rear-view mirrors. They report decisions you made two or three years ago.

By the time the comfortable numbers move, the thing causing it has been compounding since before you noticed anything was wrong.

If you recognise four or more of the six, it’s already running.

Everyone has an opinion on marketing. That's our fault.

Sat, 22 Aug 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Nobody walks into the finance team with a view on the deferred revenue policy.

Nobody tells the general counsel the indemnity clause feels a bit heavy. Nobody suggests to engineering that the database would be better in a different colour.

It happens to marketing every single day.

The website. The logo. The tone of the email. The stand at the conference. Everyone has a view, everyone offers it, and a surprising number expect it to be acted on.

The usual explanation is that everybody thinks they’re a marketer because they’ve seen adverts.

There’s something in that. But I’ve come to think it’s mostly our fault, and the reason is specific.

People defer to a function when they can’t evaluate its output, and they can’t evaluate its output when they don’t know what it’s for.

Finance is for keeping the business solvent and telling the truth about the numbers. Legal is for keeping the business out of trouble. Engineering is for making the thing work.

Ask ten people in a B2B company what marketing is for and you’ll get ten answers. Leads. Brand. The website. Making sales’ job easier. Events. Telling the story. Demand.

Those aren’t different phrasings of the same purpose. They’re different purposes.

And a function that can’t state its purpose in one line has no defence against opinion, because there’s no standard to test an opinion against.

Which is where it gets circular.

If marketing existed to do a stated thing, measured a stated way, then somebody’s view on the shade of blue would be easy to handle. Does it move the number? No? Then it’s a preference, and we can have it noted.

Without that, every opinion is as good as every other opinion, including yours. Taste versus taste. And the person with the most seniority wins, which is why so much marketing looks like whatever the CEO last saw and liked.

We didn’t get here by accident.

For thirty years marketing has described itself in whatever terms seemed most persuasive that decade. Brand when brand was fashionable. Demand generation when that was. Growth when that arrived. Revenue when we wanted to sound commercial.

Every reframing was an attempt to sound more important. The cumulative effect was to make the function harder to understand, because we kept changing the answer to what it’s for.

Meanwhile finance has said the same thing about itself for a century.

So I don’t think the fix is better internal communications or a campaign to educate the business.

The fix is to be for one thing, and to be measured on it.

My candidate is the efficiency of how customers are won. What it costs to get one, what that one is worth, and the gap between them. It’s the only thing marketing does that nobody else is doing, it’s measurable, and it survives contact with a finance director.

Once a function has a number, the opinions don’t stop.

They just stop mattering as much, because there’s finally something to test them against.

You were told you can't afford it. Nobody checked.

Sat, 15 Aug 2026 00:00:00 GMT

The pitch for fractional marketing leadership turns on one word, and almost nobody examines it.

Afford.

You can’t afford a full-time marketing director, so buy two days a week of one. The logic is clean, the maths looks obvious, and everyone in the room nods.

I’ve never once heard anyone ask what afford actually means in that sentence.

Because it’s being used to mean two completely different things.

One is a cash question. Can this business find £120,000 a year out of its current revenue? For a lot of companies the answer is genuinely no, and that’s the end of it.

The other is a return question. Would £120,000 spent on marketing leadership produce more than £120,000 of value?

The first is about what’s in the bank. The second is about whether the thing pays.

And a marketing leader isn’t funded out of revenue. They’re funded out of what they do to the return on money the business is already spending.

Which makes the question answerable, and almost nobody answers it.

Most businesses with a marketing budget are already spending several hundred thousand a year on acquiring customers. Media, agencies, events, tools, the sales time that goes into working the leads.

If someone could improve the efficiency of that spend by ten per cent, the salary question resolves itself. If they couldn’t, then two days a week of the same person won’t help either, and you’ve bought a cheaper version of something that doesn’t work.

So the honest sequence is the reverse of the usual one.

Work out what you’re currently spending to win a customer, and what that customer is worth. Then you know two things you didn’t.

You know whether you have a problem worth hiring against. And you know what level of improvement would justify what level of salary.

At that point “can we afford it” stops being a feeling about the payroll and becomes a calculation, which is a much easier conversation to have with whoever controls the money.

It also changes what you’re hiring for.

If the number says your acquisition is inefficient, you need someone who can fix that, and you should say so in the brief. Most marketing job specs don’t. They ask for someone to build pipeline, run campaigns and manage the agency, and then measure them on a revenue target they don’t control.

One more thing, and it cuts against my own argument.

Sometimes the answer genuinely is that you can’t afford it, in the plain cash sense, whatever the return would be. Cash and profit aren’t the same thing and a business can be right about the first while being wrong about the second.

That’s a fair answer. It’s just a different one from the answer most people are actually giving, which is a guess dressed as a constraint.

Check before you accept it.

The chair is disappearing, and we helped

Sat, 08 Aug 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Thirty-six per cent of the Fortune 500 still use the title Chief Marketing Officer.

A year earlier it was forty-nine.

That’s not churn. Churn is one CMO leaving and another arriving. This is the nameplate being taken off the door and the work being distributed to a Chief Growth Officer, a Chief Commercial Officer, or somebody in operations.

The usual response to that number is defensive, and I understand the instinct. Marketing is more important than ever, boards don’t understand it, short-termism, and so on.

I think the uncomfortable reading is the more useful one.

The seat isn’t being abolished. It’s going to whoever can answer for the commercial number.

And for thirty years we’ve been unable to.

Here’s how it happened, and nobody involved was acting in bad faith.

Marketing needed to prove its worth, so it measured what it could measure. Leads. Then qualified leads. Then pipeline. Then influenced revenue. Each step felt like getting closer to the money, and each one was presented to the board as progress.

The trouble is that every one of those numbers is borrowed from sales. Marketing was showing its contribution to somebody else’s result.

That worked for as long as nobody pushed. Then finance got more sophisticated, and somebody eventually asked whether the pipeline would have arrived anyway.

There was no answer. There was never going to be one, because the measurement framework had been built to demonstrate involvement rather than to establish return.

A seat at the table is a seat in a conversation about capital.

That’s what those conversations are. Where should the money go, what will it produce, and how will we know.

Sales can answer it. Finance can answer it. Operations can answer it. Marketing arrives with attribution.

So the chair gets given to somebody who speaks the language, and the title gets folded into a broader one, and nobody is being unfair.

Which is why I don’t think the answer is a campaign to defend the CMO title.

Titles follow accountability. They always have.

The number that would settle it isn’t complicated and it isn’t owned by anybody else. What it costs to win a customer, fully loaded, against what that customer returns. It’s the one measure of marketing that finance would accept without argument, and almost nobody is producing it.

Produce it, and the conversation about what the seat is called becomes irrelevant, because you’d be the only person in the room who can say whether growth is worth what it costs.

The chair is disappearing. We helped.

Which also means we can stop it.

Marketing is not a revenue function

Sat, 01 Aug 2026 00:00:00 GMT

For years, the way to look serious in marketing has been to talk about revenue. Get a pipeline number, report influenced revenue, get a seat in the forecast.

It sounds like growing up. Marketing finally talking business instead of colours and campaigns.

I spent most of my career doing exactly that, and I now think it’s the single thing keeping the discipline junior.

Start with the P&L, because that’s where these arguments actually get settled.

Revenue is one line. On most B2B org charts it has one owner, and it’s sales. They carry the target, they take the commission, they answer for the miss.

That’s not a slight on marketing. It’s just how accountability is drawn.

And two functions can’t own the same number.

So the moment marketing claims a share of revenue, it walks onto ground that already has an owner, and it does it from the weaker position. Sales closed the deal. Sales spoke to the buyer. Sales can point at the signature.

Marketing turns up afterwards with a model saying it influenced forty per cent of what happened.

You can imagine how that meeting goes.

The tool we reach for here is attribution, and attribution is where the credibility quietly drains out.

A multi-touch model will happily hand marketing a large slice of closed revenue. The problem is that finance knows, and any honest sales director knows, that most of those deals had momentum of their own. Existing accounts. Renewals. Referrals. The ordinary pull of a business that was already selling.

The model can’t tell the deal marketing created from the deal that would have closed anyway. It counts both.

So the number we bring to prove our commercial worth is precisely the number the room trusts least. Every budget cycle it gets waved through politely and discounted privately.

And the harder we push it, the more we confirm what everyone already suspects, which is that we’re marking our own homework.

Fight for a number somebody else owns and you’ll always be the junior claimant.

Now the part that should cheer you up, because none of this is an argument for marketing to shrink.

Sales owns revenue: what came in. But in most companies nobody owns the efficiency of how customers are won. What it actually costs to acquire one, fully loaded, against what that customer’s worth over their life.

That isn’t sales’ number. They’re measured on the top line, not the cost of getting there. It isn’t finance’s either. They see the totals but not the mechanics underneath them.

It sits in a gap. And it’s the most commercially important number marketing touches, because it decides whether growth is building value or quietly destroying it.

It’s also ours for the taking.

It rewards the things marketing actually controls. Sharper targeting. A stronger brand that lowers the cost to win. Better retention that lifts the value.

And unlike influenced pipeline, finance can’t wave it away, because it’s built in their language out of their kind of inputs.

Claiming a slice of revenue makes marketing a junior partner in sales’ story. Owning the efficiency of acquisition makes it the author of its own.

One is a credit dispute you’ll keep losing. The other is a number the CFO wants and currently has nobody to give them.

One fair caveat, because the argument doesn’t hold everywhere.

In some sectors marketing genuinely is a revenue engine. Ecommerce, most of consumer, the self-serve end of SaaS. The buying happens through the funnel rather than through a person, and the revenue claim there is earned.

The trouble starts when marketers in a sales-led business borrow that playbook, because the go-to-market model isn’t the same.

The tell is a real salesforce. The moment a person closes the deal, revenue has an owner in the room, and reaching for a slice of it is a fight you’ll lose. The stronger the salesforce, the less marketing should chase the revenue line and the more it should own the efficiency of what it feeds in.

So let sales keep it. It was always theirs, and wanting it was our mistake.

The commercial case for marketing was never “we helped close that.”

It’s “we can tell you, better than anyone can, whether the customers you’re winning are worth what they cost, and we can move that number.”

Marketing isn’t a revenue function. It’s an efficiency of growth function.

That’s a promotion, not a demotion, and it’s sitting there unclaimed.

Dark channels are real. The panic isn't.

Fri, 24 Jul 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Buyers do most of their deciding where you can’t see them.

They read a Slack message from someone they trust. They listen to a podcast in the car. They ask a former colleague. They lurk in a community for eight months. Then eventually they type your name into Google and arrive, looking to your analytics like someone who came from organic search.

That’s all true, and it’s been true for years. Everyone selling to a committee already knows it.

What isn’t true is that this is a crisis.

There’s now an entire category of product sold on the anxiety. Tools to illuminate the dark funnel. Self-reported attribution. Intent signals from communities. Ways to finally see what’s happening where you can’t look.

Some of it is genuinely useful. Most of it is selling relief from a feeling rather than an answer to a problem.

And the feeling is the tell. The panic about dark channels is mostly panic about not being able to claim credit, which is a marketing problem rather than a business problem.

Here’s the thing worth noticing.

Your finance director isn’t losing sleep over dark channels. They’ve never asked which podcast the buyer listened to.

The question they’re asking is whether the money you spent came back. That question does not require you to see inside a Slack group. It requires you to know what winning a customer costs, all in, and what that customer returns.

Both of those are visible. Neither of them is dark.

So the honest answer to dark channels is two things, and neither is a tool.

The first is a brand worth recommending. If buying decisions are being made in conversations you’ll never see, the only thing you can influence is what gets said in them. That’s brand, and it’s the least trackable and most valuable thing marketing does. You can’t attribute it. You can measure its absence, in longer cycles and deeper discounts and a higher cost to win, which is where it shows up.

The second is unit economics worth watching. If your cost to win a customer is falling and what that customer’s worth is rising, something is working, and the fact that you can’t say precisely which podcast did it is not a business problem. It’s an accounting curiosity.

The version of this I’d resist.

Spending real money on tools that produce a slightly better guess about the unknowable, so that marketing can attach itself to deals it can’t prove it created.

That’s the same reflex that got us into the attribution argument in the first place. Dark channels didn’t create it. They just made it harder to keep pretending.

You were never going to see it all. You were only ever going to be able to tell whether it paid.

The wrong question, measured brilliantly

Thu, 18 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT

B2B marketing has built the most sophisticated measurement function in business.

I mean that. Not as a set-up for a joke.

Think about what’s available now. Every touch a buyer makes, logged. Attribution models that can apportion credit across nine interactions over fourteen months. Intent data telling you a company is in-market before they’ve contacted anyone. Dashboards refreshing hourly. Cohort analysis, funnel velocity, engagement scoring, channel mix modelling.

There are something like fifteen thousand marketing technology products. Fifteen thousand. Finance has a general ledger and a spreadsheet.

And with all of that, most marketing functions still can’t answer the simplest commercial question anyone could ask them.

What does it cost you to win a customer, and is that customer worth it?

Not roughly. Not cost per lead. Not a blended figure someone put together for a board pack. The actual number, fully loaded, against what that customer actually returns.

Ask for it and you’ll usually get one of three answers. A cost per lead, which isn’t the same thing. A cost per acquisition that counts media spend and nothing else. Or a pause, followed by someone offering to go and work it out.

How does a function measure this much and know this little?

Because measurement follows the question you were set, and we were set the wrong one.

The question marketing has spent twenty years answering is: can you show that what you did contributed? That’s a credit question. It’s about proving involvement in something that already happened. And once that’s the question, the tooling that follows is exactly what got built. Attribution exists to apportion credit. Influenced pipeline exists to claim a share. Engagement scoring exists to demonstrate activity mattered.

All of it is beautifully engineered for a question nobody outside marketing actually cares about.

The question the business is asking is different, and much simpler.

Is this worth doing?

That doesn’t need attribution. It needs two numbers put next to each other, one of which lives in marketing and one of which lives in finance.

Nobody built a fifteen-thousand-product industry to answer it, because there’s no industry in it. It’s arithmetic. It takes a few hours and a conversation with your finance lead.

The uncomfortable part is that the sophistication made things worse rather than better.

A function that couldn’t measure anything would have been forced to argue from judgement, and judgement is at least honest about what it is.

What we built instead was an apparatus producing enormous quantities of real, accurate, internally consistent data that answers a question the room didn’t ask. And because the output looks rigorous, it takes a long time for anyone to notice that it isn’t answering anything.

It survives every budget review. It gets waved through politely. And it never once changes a decision.

I’m not arguing for less measurement.

I’m arguing that the most sophisticated measurement function in business has been pointed, with real skill and considerable expense, at the wrong thing.

Turn it a few degrees and it’s the most useful function in the company.

$3m a year to win customers worth $40

Mon, 01 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT

I’d just taken over marketing at a business turning over $300m a year. Positive EBITDA, targets being hit, nothing obviously wrong with it.

What bothered me was one line in the budget I’d inherited.

Three million dollars a year on paid search. Thirty per cent of everything I had.

I’d never seen that much go into a single channel. That was the whole of my objection. Not a theory, just a number that looked out of proportion, and a new person’s licence to ask what it was doing.

The reporting on it was good.

That’s the part people find hardest to believe. It was run by a good digital team and supported by an expensive agency who also knew what they were doing. Cost per click, cost per lead, conversion rates, all of it detailed and all of it real.

Everyone was busy and the dashboard was green.

Nobody was pleased to be asked about it, and I understand why. A new marketing director questioning the biggest line in the digital budget looks like a new marketing director who doesn’t understand digital. Which was fair. I’m not a digital specialist. I’m a marketer.

So rather than argue about it, I asked the team and the agency to walk me through how the optimisation actually worked.

It went like this. Somebody clicks an ad, lands on a page, converts. That becomes a lead in the CRM. The lead goes to a sales rep. The rep works it. Eventually it becomes an opportunity, and eventually that opportunity closes, won or lost.

Every week, the agency took an extract from the CRM, found the deals that had closed, traced them back to the ad clicks that started them, and optimised the campaigns towards whatever had produced those wins.

Which sounds entirely sensible until you sit with it for a second.

So I asked how you optimise today’s advertising using buying signals that might be three months old.

The room went quiet.

Not because anyone had been hiding anything, and not because anyone had got it wrong on their own terms. Because nobody had said it out loud in that order before, and once it was said, everyone in the room could see it at the same time.

The method the agency were using is a good method. In e-commerce it’s the right one, because the click and the purchase are minutes apart and the feedback loop is tight enough to steer by. Optimise towards the clicks that bought, get more clicks that buy.

Here, the signal left the internet at the point of conversion and disappeared into a CRM and a sales process for weeks or months. By the time it came back, the campaigns that produced it had already been adjusted a dozen times on the basis of the ones before.

We were steering by a wake that had nothing to do with where the boat was pointing.

And once the optimisation is untethered, what it optimises for is volume.

Cheap clicks, cheap leads, lots of them. Which is exactly what it had been delivering, faithfully, for years, at three million dollars a year.

When we worked out what those customers were actually worth, the answer was about $40 each. Not $40 a month. Not $40,000 across a contract. Forty dollars, in total, for as long as they stayed.

The last question is why nobody had noticed.

We had around 13,500 customers. Roughly 1,100 of them were large, long-tenured and extremely profitable. Those eleven hundred paid for everything. They paid for the other twelve thousand four hundred, they paid for the three million, and they kept every number on every dashboard the right colour.

Average the whole book and it looked healthy, because on average it was.

Two completely different businesses were running under one roof on one budget, and the good one was quietly funding the bad one. Nothing in the reporting separated them, because nothing had ever been cut that way.

That’s what makes this failure so durable. It doesn’t arrive as a loss. It arrives years later as growth that stopped paying for itself, long after the decisions that caused it.

The spend moved. Not away from marketing, and not down. Away from the segment that couldn’t repay it, towards the one that could.

The team, the agency and I worked on it very differently from that point on, and it was a great deal better than what we’d all been doing separately.

One last thing, which is why I tell this story rather than a tidier one.

I didn’t know I was doing ratio work. I’d never calculated a customer acquisition cost in my life and I couldn’t have told you what customer lifetime value meant. Nobody I worked with used either term.

I worked out years later what I’d actually done, which was compare what a customer cost against what a customer was worth, because the alternative was signing off a number I couldn’t explain.

You don’t need to be qualified to ask that. I wasn’t.

What you need is to be suspicious of an average, and willing to look stupid in a room full of specialists.