A prospect I spoke to this week is absolutely convinced that the thing standing between her and success is data.

Not targeting data or click data or anything like that. She wanted to find clean, pristine data that showed precisely the impact that her agency had on her clients' success.

She had spent the last two months talking to data partner after data partner, obsessing over first-party data capture, channel attribution dashboards, retargeting segments & whatever whiz-bang stuff she could find.

I told her to stop.

A marketing dashboard is a negotiation with reality. It is a version of events that makes sense, not a version that is true.

I have been doing digital marketing since 1997 and we still haven’t figured out attribution. And you know what? That’s 100% fine. Marketing, inherently, is a multimodal space involving, online activities (y’all know waaaay too much about those), traditional media (TV, movies, etc.), social factors (friends, family, et al), place factors (where do you go & who do you see), affinities (taste, style, politics & more), weather factors (too hot, too cold, too anything and sales get whacky), news (let’s not go there, today…), personal factors (job, divorce, health, family, etc.) and more that impact buyer behavior.

That means there are a million disconnected “bubbles of influence” that influence your purchase decisions (B2B & B2C). There is no algorithm now, or in the foreseeable future, that is going to be able to measure all of them. (Heck, most folks haven’t even figured out how to not show you ads for the thing that you just bought from them!)

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Yeah - this is tough. Clients want to know what kind of benefit their media and service spend brings so they can measure the impact of their investments. Prospects want you to know what they can/should expect and what you will or won’t guarantee.

I know. I get it.

In my last agency (before the age of AI), we built a super sophisticated thing that connected online visitors to known customers in the client data - and within an acceptable degree of fudge, we were able to predict the future 2 year revenue value & profit generated of a buyer based on the marketing campaigns they had engaged in. It was fucking cool as shit.

For a ton a marketers we worked with, we were able to help them allocate more money to some campaigns and products and less to others. We were feeling smart. But the more data we collected, we discovered that almost all campaigns we could measure for an individual client ended up with the same 2 year LTV and profit predictions. We were measuring as granularly as possible, and running complex calculations all the freaking time.

This wasn’t a data problem…it was a people problem. Some people who make a purchase through a clearance sale end up being great customers. Others who buy front of catalog merch a no discounts disappear and never come back.

We though the data made us smarter. After a while, we realized it just showed us what we didn’t know. We didn’t and couldn’t know all of the “bubbles of influence” that impact behaviors.

Data is awesome…but incomplete.

For most of the digital marketing era, an amazing differentiator was platform knowledge & process. You didn’t have to know how to run better campaigns - you primarily had to know which button to push and which toggle to flip.

That era is over is (thank, gawd…)

Platforms do not want you touching anything anymore. Google, Meta & every other platform want to make decisions for you. The mechanical advantage that agencies used to have has evaporated.

But agencies are still trying to differentiate on mechanics. "We have better data." "We have cleaner attribution." "We have a proprietary dashboard." That is the agency equivalent of a car mechanic telling you they have a nicer wrench.

Nobody cares about your fucking wrench.

Think of this as a mental power-up.

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Your agency, even if you are on the design & build side of things, or a creative agency, or even an “ai automations” agency, isn’t a data and technology partner. You are a make things better partner.

Your agency is supposed to leverage its skills and talents to solve the problems you and your clients decide are holding their business back from growth or profitability, or whatever their strategic goals are.

That’s the whole thing.

Your biggest brilliance as an agency leader is helping your team know how to identify what makes your client amazing…even if they aren't. (Let's face it, most businesses, including agencies, aren't amazing.) But there is something that is unique about your client that you can maximize and amplify, & celebrate.

That’s a differentiator.

It’s not a dashboard, a pixel, or an attribution model.

Our earnest agency founder on the call I referenced earlier was horrified and relieved to hear the following:

"What?" she said. I told her that her job as a paid media agency ends at the click. She has done her job by finding a story and a mechanism to drive traffic. After that, the things that influence the purchase are mostly contained within the visitor experience. Since she and her agency had no purview over pricing, client experience, or inventory, her job was to show a story of value to an interested audience.

In many ways, a click on one of the ads that she and her team created was evidence of her success. Though she continued to be very trapped by the fallacy that everything is measurable. She wanted to show a crystal clear, unassailable thread of causality from campaign to conversion.

The “disconnected bubbles of influence” are undefeated. There is no thread of causality that is unassailable.

I helped her focus on the places where she and her team have been most successful to this point. It hasn't been data that has driven her success. She works in hospitality marketing & the things that made the biggest impact were the places with the best stories. Those stories can be told in image, test, video, reviews & more. It was (and always had been) the front end storytelling that made the difference in performance.

Strangely enough, her best-performing clients weren't the ones with the cleanest data. The best performers emerged where the connection between her client's value proposition and how deeply she and her team understood all of the things that are amazing about their client. It wasn’t about the quality or beauty of her clients' hotels, it was about the intrinsic story that she and her team could tell about the property. Those clients who exposed & shared their vibes, vision, and values allowed better stories to be told. Better stories turned into better performance.

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You need to stop thinking that dashboards, attribution models, data cleanup, tracking implementation, pixel management & “proprietary process” are your differentiator.

All of the technology pieces are simple tools that you use to express your depth of understanding of the client. If you've been around this newsletter for a minute, you know that the benefits you get from that understanding your client deeply - your Return On Understanding - is the differentiator that allows you to leverage all of those tools in service of your client to generate the best return for them and the best return for you.

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