How to Justify Your Existence by Attributing Your Spends (And Why Attribution Is Mostly Bullsh*t)

Let’s be honest. Every marketer, every quarter, asks the same question with a straight face and a clenched jaw: “What’s my ROI?”
It’s a fair question. It’s also one of the most politically charged questions in modern Marketing, especially when organizations have a complex and matured Marketing Technology (MarTech) stack.

Because behind that question isn’t curiosity. It’s fear. Fear of budget cuts. Fear of relevance. Fear of being the next cost line item to be “optimized.”

And that’s exactly why attribution has become less of a measurement problem and more of a survival tactic.

Attribution Was Supposed to Create Clarity. It Created Turf Wars.

On paper, attribution models sound logical:

• Last-click attribution: Give credit to the final interaction.

• First-touch attribution: Reward the channel that introduced the customer.

• Multi-touch attribution: Spread credit across the journey.

• Marketing Mix Modelling (MMM): Use statistics to estimate incremental impact.

In reality? Most of these models never make it past a slide deck.

Why?

Because the moment money, headcount, and performance reviews are tied to them, attribution stops being analytical and starts being political.

Media teams want credit for demand creation.
CRM teams want credit for conversion.
Brand teams want credit for long-term impact.
Product teams want credit for experience.

Everyone wants credit. No one wants shared responsibility.

The Dirty Truth: Attribution Is a Human Problem, Not a Data Problem

You can have the best data architecture in the world.
You can invest millions in a pristine data foundation.
You can deploy cutting-edge MarTech stacks and marketing analytics platforms.

And it still won’t fix the real issue.

Because no attribution methodology fixes incentives.

Not last-click.
Not multi-touch.
Not marketing mix modelling.

Attribution fails not because the math is wrong—but because organizations are structured to compete internally.

When teams are incentivized purely on the conversions they personally “own”, attribution becomes a weapon. A justification tool. A way to defend budgets and existence.

View-Through Conversions: The Most Hated Metric (Until You Need It)

Let’s talk about view-through conversions—the metric everyone pretends to hate.

Media teams argue they’re essential for capturing upper-funnel impact.
CRM teams dismiss them as “unprovable.”
Finance teams roll their eyes.

Here’s the uncomfortable truth:
Teams selectively believe in it only when it benefits them.

That’s not analytics. That’s politics with spreadsheets.

Marketing Mix Modelling: The Zombie Model That Won’t Die

Ah yes, Marketing Mix Modelling—the executive favorite.

MMM promises:

• Channel neutrality

• Incrementality

• Statistical rigor

But in today’s always-on, hyper-personalized, multi-device world?

MMM often lags reality by months, relies on assumptions nobody fully understands, and conveniently validates decisions already made.

It’s not useless, but let’s stop pretending it’s a silver bullet. MMM doesn’t resolve channel-level accountability. It abstracts it—just enough to keep everyone equally dissatisfied.

Customers Don’t Care About Your Org Chart

Here’s the part many CMOs still struggle to accept:

Customers do not care if a message came from paid media, CRM, product, or brand.

An email is a brand message.
A push notification is a brand message.
A paid ad is a brand message.

So why are we still structuring organizations—and incentives—as if customers experience channels in isolation?

Short answer: legacy thinking.

Long answer: it’s easier to manage silos than ecosystems.

The Real Fix: Stop Incentivizing Channels. Start Incentivizing Outcomes.

If you want attribution to actually work, change needs to come top-down.

Not another model.
Not another dashboard.
Not another MarTech vendor.

What actually needs to change:

• Shared overall sales and growth targets across paid, owned, CRM, product, and brand teams

• Clear acknowledgment that conversion is an ecosystem outcome, not a channel win

• Individual KPIs that support—but do not override—the collective goal

Yes, individual targets matter. No, pretending channels operate independently is not “accountability”—it’s delusion.

Attribution Won’t Save Your Job. Alignment Might.

No attribution model will justify your existence if your organization is structurally misaligned.

Last-click won’t save you.
Multi-touch won’t save you.
Marketing Mix Modelling won’t save you.

Only leadership alignment, shared incentives, and honest conversations will.

And yes—that’s uncomfortable.
But so is watching yet another “perfect” attribution model die quietly after the quarterly business review.

If your teams are arguing over credit more than outcomes, you don’t have an attribution problem—you have an organizational problem, and no amount of attribution modelling will fix that.
If these issues sound painfully familiar, contact us today. Let’s have an honest conversation about how to make attribution fair, transparent, and actually useful—not just another slide that no one believes and someone uses to “live another quarter”.