The Marketing Attribution Crutch

I love the promise of marketing attribution. Wouldn’t it be wonderful to know dollar for dollar the impact of every tactic we deploy as marketers? Add a little Pay Per Click and we will get X. Subtract a little Facebook and we get Y. That is the promise, right? We can assign values to each touch point that our customers have with our brand to build the magical and perfect media plan.

Cynicism aside, I love the advancement of attribution models and I am in awe of the companies that are building models that really can start to tell us what is impacting the customer journey. My issue with all of it is more the crutch that it may become versus focusing on really great strategy and really impactful creative ideas.

Seasonality, world events, unexpected life occurrences – these are all things that attribution will always struggle to account for fully. Yes, these same things are challenges for any marketing activity. But my point still goes back to spending more time on the original principles of great advertising. Focus on the target, the current perception, the desired state we want to achieve, and ultimately the Big Idea that will generate not only awareness but a ground swell of word of mouth activity amplified by all of the social channels that our customer have at their disposal.

Marketing attribution models will be the talk of our industry for years to come. As budgets become tighter and mediums become both more numerous and more complex, we will constantly be looking for ways to know what is moving the needle. In this rush to analyze every spec of data, I suggest we not forget what still makes the biggest impact – a killer concept.