News
Marketing Team Mourns Passing of Beloved Persona, Sally Shopper

NEW YORK — The marketing department at DinoTech is in mourning today following the sudden loss of their favorite customer persona, Sally Shopper, who passed away peacefully after a strategic refocusing of key objectives.

Sally, aged somewhere between 35-45 depending on which slide deck you referenced, leaves behind 2.3 children, 1.8 cars, and a mortgage that was "aspirational yet attainable." She had a modest household income of $75,000-$125,000 and enjoyed a number of hobbies that were "both active and passive in nature."

"Sally wasn't just a stock photo of a woman enjoying her avocado toast," said DinoTech Marketing Manager Kelly Finkes, fighting back tears. "She was so much more. She was a woman sitting alone with her laptop because she had 'purchasing authority' and 'valued quality over price, except when she didn't.'"

Sally's friends knew her as someone who appreciated "content that speaks to her needs" and "solutions, not products." Colleagues fondly remember how she would check her smartphone "between 50-200 times daily" while simultaneously being "concerned about screen time."

"We know it will be difficult to replace the impact she had," confided RevOps Director Tom Reynolds. "But we’re going to try to move on by welcoming in 'Millennial Mike' who's 'digital-native' yet somehow prefers weekly direct mail flyers, and 'Decision-Making Donna' who's 'budget-focused' yet also 'values premium experiences.'"

At press time, the team was debating whether Sally would have wanted her memory honored with an email drip campaign or a "friction-less omnichannel experience."

Editorial
The Great Attribution Delusion
Tales from the Black Book

From the Mind of B.F. Spaulding

Publisher’s Note: The following was extracted from Mr. Spaulding's infamous "Black Book of Marketing Horror Stories" after we agreed to pay his airport bar tab. He sent the following over multiple days via text messages, but we’re not sure why.

One day I watched a perfectly reasonable marketing director lose her mind in real time. It was Denver, 2022, in one of those glass conference rooms where you feel like a cheap carnival goldfish and everyone on the outside can see spirits breaking simultaneously. The CFO had just asked — for the third time in fifteen minutes — which exact display ad caused the $2.7 million enterprise deal to close.

That's why I keep for my little black book.

There's a special kind of unaided madness that's infected our profession. I call it "The Great Attribution Delusion," a collective hallucination where we've convinced ourselves that human decision-making — that messy, irrational, often bourbon-influenced process — can be reduced to a series of concrete trackable digital breadcrumbs leading straight to the checkout counter.

I need a drink just thinking about it. Excuse me.

[Publisher: The next text took 12 hours to arrive.]

Where was I? Ah yes, attribution. The marketing equivalent of trying to determine which raindrop caused the flood, without understanding why it’s raining in the first place.

MQLs are a perfect example. MQLs are marketing jargon for Marketing Qualified Leads, a term I'm convinced was invented by the same people who suggest you can lose weight while eating nothing but bacon. Both ideas sound great at first, but as I’ve learned from watching Reacher, the details matter. ¹

In order for a lead to get passed to sales they must reach a magical threshold that signifies they are worthy.

But here's what actually happens –

Marketing creates an elaborate scoring model that would make OpenAI engineers weep. Sales ignores it completely. The CRO demands more MQLs. Marketing arbitrarily lowers the threshold for what constitutes "qualified." Sales complains about lead quality. Marketing raises the threshold. Lead volume drops. The CRO questions marketing's existence. Marketing drinks heavily. Rinse and repeat until either the company is acquired or the CMO is replaced. I've watched this exact cycle play out at too many companies.

I once sat in a meeting where a very serious man in a very expensive suit proudly displayed a slide proclaiming that customers who visited the pricing page were 72% more likely to purchase. The executive team nodded sagely, as if witnessing profound wisdom. Not one person mentioned the obvious: people who are interested in buying something generally want to know how much it costs. This isn't attribution. This is common sense wearing a fancy algorithm costume.

Another time I watched a marketing team spend six months building the "perfect" multi-touch attribution model. It was beautiful, really. It accounted for everything: first touch, last touch, view-through conversions, time decay, position-based weighting. It would probably predict your breakfast choice if you fed it enough data.

The problem? It showed that their $2 million paid search program had generated approximately $43,000 in attributable revenue. Rather than questioning the investment, they questioned the model. I believe the phrase used was, "The attribution must be broken because we know Google works."

Do we, though? Do we really?

[Publisher: Another gap in texts, marked by a mistaken text with what seems to be a room service order.]

The biggest problem is that we've lost the plot. Marketing has always been part art, part science. But somewhere along the way, we became so obsessed with debating the science that we forgot about the art entirely.

Real human attention can't be purchased; it can only be earned. It's earned through understanding, through connection, through speaking to actual human needs rather than demographic abstractions. The best marketing I've ever seen wasn't trackable in any meaningful way. It was a story that resonated so deeply that people couldn't help but share it. It was an insight so profound that it changed how customers saw themselves, not just the product.

Yet we're out here arguing about whether a display ad impression that was 30% viewable for 1.7 seconds should get 0.25 or 0.3 attribution points.

I've seen CMOs fired because they couldn't prove the ROI of brand campaigns in a 90-day window. I've watched content teams reduced to creating "high-performing assets" which is code for "SEO-optimized listicles that nobody actually reads." I've seen brilliant creative concepts rejected because "we can't track engagement accurately enough."

I’m honestly more than a little sad by what I've written in my black book over 30 years and a lot of those things come from attribution conversations.

So let me offer you this advice:

• If your attribution model shows results that align perfectly with what you wanted to believe anyway, it's probably wrong. Creating data to justify our bias is how we pick politicians, not winning marketing campaigns.

• The more touchpoints involved in a buying decision, the less accurate any attribution model becomes. For enterprise sales, you might as well use a Magic 8-Ball.

• When an executive asks which specific marketing activity caused a deal to close, the only honest answer is "all of them and none of them, and also the competitor's product broke at a critical moment, and the buyer's kid got into Harvard which put them in a good mood."

• Any attribution model that doesn't include "random chance" as a significant factor is a work of fiction.

• The best marketing often shows up as "direct traffic" in your analytics, which is both a triumph and a tragedy.

I'm not suggesting we abandon measurement. I may be old and cynical, but I'm not a dinosaur. What I am suggesting is that we approach attribution with the appropriate level of skepticism — the same level you should apply to anyone claiming they can make a perfect Old Fashioned in an airport bar. (They can't, but I keep letting them try.)

The next time you're asked to prove the precise ROI of a marketing activity, consider responding with a question: "Would you ask a parent which specific conversation led their child to selecting a major in college?" Then watch their expression carefully while taking a thoughtful and probably needed sip of bourbon.

The good ones get it.

The rest? Well, that's why I keep the black book.

B.F. Spaulding is Editor in Chief of Marketing Burnout and proudly maintains a collection of attribution models that have been proven less accurate than a dart-throwing monkey. He can be reached at the hotel bar nearest to whichever marketing conference has the best weather this month.

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