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The Best AI Native Marketers are Just Great Marketers

Tue, 07 Apr 2026 20:30:01 GMT

The channel has always been the hype. The fundamentals have never changed.

Recently I was asked how I would go about hiring an AI Native marketing team. The question motivated me to think about how every generation of marketers has faced a moment when a new channel arrives and the industry loses its mind. The language is always the same: everything has changed, the old rules no longer apply, you need people who think differently, who were born into this medium.

The channel is always presented as a paradigm shift rather than what it actually is: a new playing field on which the same human motivations play out.

We are living through one of those moments right now with AI. And if history is any guide, the companies that will win are not the ones that hire an “AI native” marketing team. They are the ones that hire exceptional marketers who happen to be incorporating AI into every aspect of a fundamentally unchanged discipline.

The television lesson

When broadcast television scaled in the 1950s and 1960s, the advertising industry did what it always does: it panicked into specialization. Suddenly there were “television creatives” who were treated as categorically different from the print people. The medium was different, it moved, it had sound, it reached living rooms. But the breakthrough campaigns of that era were not won by people who were native to the screen. They were won by people like David Ogilvy and Bill Bernbach, who had internalized something deeper: a rigorous, almost anthropological understanding of what motivates a person to act, and an instinct for how to present an idea with clarity and force.

The channel was new. The question: what does this person want, and how do I make them believe I can give it to them? was not.

The direct mail lesson

The 1980s brought another revolution. Database marketing and direct mail transformed marketing from an art of persuasion into a science of segmentation. Response rates, lists, A/B testing at scale, cost per acquisition as a north star. The dominant narrative was that a new breed of “data driven” marketer had superseded the intuitive, creative kind. Some companies hired accordingly, building teams of analysts who could optimize a mailing list but had no idea what made an offer compelling.

The direct mail marketers who actually built durable businesses never made that mistake. They understood the data as a way to be more precise about human psychology, not a replacement for it. The ability to segment was useless without a deep understanding of which segment wanted what, and why. The offer still had to be right. The story still had to land.

The social media lesson

This is the one most CMOs lived through professionally, so it deserves the most scrutiny. When social media arrived in the mid-2000s, the pressure to hire “digital natives” was intense. The conventional wisdom held that people who had grown up on these platforms had an intuitive grasp of them that older marketers could never replicate. Agencies built “social media practices.” Job descriptions appeared for “community managers” and “social strategists” who were valued primarily for their fluency with the platforms themselves.

Some of that specialization was warranted: the mechanics of Facebook’s algorithm, the culture of Twitter, the visual grammar of Instagram all genuinely required investment to understand. But watch what happened over the next fifteen years. The brands that built lasting audiences on social media were not the ones with the most platform fluent teams. They were the ones with the clearest point of view, the most consistent voice, and the deepest understanding of what their customers actually cared about. Patagonia. Nike. Basecamp. Dollar Shave Club. The channel amplified their conviction; it did not substitute for it. They avoided the trap of endlessly running on a treadmill, producing content that was perfectly native and entirely forgettable.

What this means for AI

Here is the blunt version of the argument: when you hire for an AI native marketing team, you are making the same category error that has been made at every channel inflection point.

You are mistaking fluency with the medium for mastery of the discipline.

AI is genuinely powerful. It compresses work that used to take days into hours. It enables a two-person content operation to produce at a scale that previously required a team of ten. It changes the economics of personalization, testing, and iteration in ways that are still being understood. None of this is hype. The capability shift is real.

But capability is not strategy. The marketers who will use AI most effectively are not the ones who know the most prompting tricks. They are the ones who can do four things that AI currently cannot:

What to actually hire for

If the above is right, then the hiring brief for a strong marketing team in 2026 looks almost identical to what it looked like in 2006 or 1986 with one important addition.

You want people who are rigorous about understanding the customer. You want people who have developed a sense of taste who have read widely, been exposed to a lot of great marketing, and can articulate why something works.

You want people who are analytically honest, who will read results without narrative bias and change course when the data warrants it. You want people who understand the business at a level that allows them to make judgment calls, not just execute briefs. And you want people who are genuinely curious about AI as a capability, not as an identity.

That last distinction matters more than it might seem. When you are evaluating candidates, resist the temptation to weigh AI tool fluency heavily in the scorecard. Ask questions that surface the underlying judgment the role requires — and then ask, separately, how they are using AI in their current work. A strong answer sounds like: "I use it to compress the research and first-draft phase so I can spend more time on the positioning decisions that actually matter." A weak answer sounds like: "I've built a bunch of custom GPTs and I'm really deep in the tooling." The first person has a discipline; AI accelerates it. The second person has made the tool the job and without the discipline underneath, the acceleration goes nowhere.

Television didn’t change what great marketing was. It changed the cost structure of reach.

Direct mail didn’t change what great marketing was. It changed the economics of targeting.

Social media didn’t change what great marketing was. It changed the velocity and visibility of the feedback loop.

AI won’t change what great marketing is. It will change the economics of production, the speed of iteration, and the scale at which personalization is possible.

The channel is never the secret sauce. The secret sauce is the same as it has always been: a clear-eyed understanding of what the customer wants, a genuine point of view about how to meet that want, and the judgment to know the difference between content that builds something and content that just fills space.

Hire for that. The AI will follow.

The 2026 Manifesto: Stress Testing David Ogilvy’s 38 Rules for the Age of AI

Tue, 31 Mar 2026 11:00:08 GMT

AI Didn’t Break Advertising: It Just Exposed Who Forgot the Fundamentals

Recently I came across a fascinating article from 1972. David Ogilvy published an advertisement that doubled as a manifesto. "How to Create Advertising That Sells" distilled everything Ogilvy & Mather learned from $1.48 billion in advertising and $4.9 million in tracking results into 38 principles. It remains one of the most cited documents in advertising history. But it got me thinking, how much of this is still relevant in the digital, AI age? Spoiler alert almost all of it!

More than fifty years later, the advertising landscape has been reshaped by forces Ogilvy could not have anticipated. Large language models serve as purchasing research agents, and buying decisions are often finalized in encrypted messaging channels before a vendor is ever contacted. In this ocean of AI generated content, authenticity has become the scarcest commodity in marketing.

And yet, reading Ogilvy’s 38 principles today is a humbling exercise. The vast majority of them are not just still relevant, they are more relevant. The underlying truths about human psychology, brand building, and the hard math of selling have not changed. What has changed is the mechanism through which those truths operate.

I put together an eBook discussing this further; asking if the principle still holds, how AI has changed its operation, and what new principles this era demands.

TIMELESS (20 Principles): The principle is as true today as it was in 1972 because AI has not changed the underlying logic.
TRANSFORMED (10 Principles): The principle still holds, but AI has fundamentally changed the mechanism or venue where it operates.
EXPANDED (8 Principles): The principle is true and now applies to audiences and contexts Ogilvy never imagined.

The 4 New Principles for the AI Era

While the fundamentals are resilient, the intersection of AI and dark social required four essential additions to the playbook:

Optimize for the AI Gatekeeper: Position your brand for the algorithms that increasingly mediate the first stage of the buying journey through Generative Engine Optimization (GEO).
Build Trust in the Rooms You Cannot See: Deploy experts as practitioners in the private Slack and Discord communities where decisions are actually made.
Connect the Digital Thread: Link marketing automation to CRM systems to shift measurement from simple attribution to total pipeline influence.
Authenticity Is the New Quality: Prioritize raw, human created content, like a product engineer’s phone video, over AI polished perfection.

The strategic principles of positioning, promise, and big ideas are thriving in the AI era because they are rooted in human psychology. AI did not break advertising; it simply raised the cost of ignoring the fundamentals.

Dig into the ebook for more!

Dark Social Dividend: Turning Measurement Blind Spots into Revenue Velocity

Mon, 23 Mar 2026 11:45:01 GMT

If you are a marketing leader obsessed with perfect attribution, Dark Social is your nightmare. If you are a marketing leader obsessed with revenue velocity, Dark Social is your greatest unfair advantage.

In 2026, the digital landscape is fractured. As public feeds become saturated with AI generated noise, buyers have retreated. Research from early this year shows that 71% of B2B purchasing decisions are now finalized in dark channels encrypted messaging, private Slack communities, and invite-only peer circles.

The Attribution Mirage

Dark Social isn’t a mystery; it’s a privacy-first survival mechanism. Traditional attribution models are currently missing up to 2.7x more touchpoints than they capture because the modern buyer journey is no longer a funnel: it’s a private ecosystem.

Current 2026 data indicates that 90% of the B2B buying journey is completed before a prospect ever raises their hand on your site. They are validating your claims in:

Encrypted Peer to Peer: WhatsApp, Signal, and Telegram threads.
The Second Office: Industry-specific Slack and Discord silos.
AI Research Agents: Buyers using LLMs to synthesize vendor pros and cons before visiting a single landing page.

The problem isn’t that your marketing is ineffective. The problem is that you are optimizing for the 30% of the room you can see, while ignoring the 70% of the room that actually carries the checkbook.

From Volume to Validation

You cannot buy your way into a private C-Suite WhatsApp group with a 30 day cookie. To win in 2026,you must shift some of your capital from Lead Generation to Trust Equity.

To cultivate an Invisible Advantage, pivot to three strategic pillars:

Subject Matter Authority (Not Ghostwriting): You need to stop treating your technical experts like ghostwriters for generic SEO blogs. Instead, deploy them as Architects of Influence in niche forums and private communities. When your practitioner provides a high-value solution in a private Slack without the friction of a "gated PDF" they aren't just being helpful; they are hard wiring a default preference for your brand in the rooms where decisions are actually made.
Generative Engine Optimization (GEO): You must recognize that LLMs are your new "Dark" gatekeepers. Your mission is to obsessively seed your verified technical data and proprietary "Point of View" (POV) frameworks where these models train. If a buyer asks an AI agent for a vendor procurement summary, you cannot afford to be the "generic alternative" you must ensure your brand is the cited authority.
Shareable Friction: In an era defined by "AI slop," your only real currency is raw authenticity. You should pivot away from over-polished whitepapers that no one reads and toward Units of Trust. These are high-impact, snackable assets, think 60second video walkthroughs of specific features, "leaked" internal ROI benchmarks, or mobile-first screenshots designed specifically for your prospects to copy paste directly into their private internal group chats.

Measuring the Digital Thread

If we cannot track the click, how do we justify the spend in building assets or deploying resources against these Dark Social channels. We correlate our investments against three macro-indicators:

High Intent Self Reported Data: For example add a non required field to demo forms: "How did you actually hear about us?" The answers "A peer Slack group," "A podcast mention" are significant positive signals of effectiveness in 2026
Pipeline Velocity: Are deals originating from "Dark" influence closing faster? (The answer is almost always yes, as the validation happened before the first sales call).
Digital Sales Room (DSR) Analytics: When a prospect shares the DSR internally track the expansion of stakeholders. A spike in "anonymous" views from a prospect's Legal or Finance domain is the "light" that proves the dark social strategy worked.

The Final Word: Own the Room You Can't See

You can either continue using outdated metrics as a defense for your budget, or you can embrace the role of Revenue Architect. Dark Social isn't an obstacle; it's the room where your reputation lives. By trading "Lead Gen" tactics for an "Invisible Advantage," you ensure your brand isn't just part of the conversation, it is the conversation.

Every new CMO starts with a 90-day plan. They should also bring a succession plan.

Thu, 12 Mar 2026 12:15:05 GMT

If you are a marketing professional who has spent five minutes online or on LinkedIn lately, you’ve likely seen the CMO role discussed in one of two ways:

The Playbook: How to be the ultimate growth architect, AI innovator, and board-level advisor.
The Obituary: Data-heavy warnings about shrinking tenures, deleted roles, and the disconnect between marketing and the rest of the C-suite.

The second category often paints the CMO as an endangered species. But there is a massive epilogue missing from these tenure statistics. Where do these CMOs actually go?

Contrary to the fired CMO trope, recent research from VCMO and Spencer Stuart suggests a much more empowered reality: Modern CMOs aren't just exiting; they are ascending. Whether it’s moving into a CEO role (now roughly 10% of exits), transitioning to Private Equity as an Operating Partner, or building a high-impact Fractional career, the "exit" is often a promotion by choice.

The Missing Part of the Plan

Every incoming CMO or VP of Marketing enters the building with a 90 day ramp up plan. We are obsessed with the start. But if we are to truly embrace the CMO role as a strategic business driver, we must also bring a succession plan.

This isn't about being trite or one foot out the door. It’s about beginning with the end in mind. If you don't know what your next looks like or at a minimum which category your next lives in; you cannot effectively build the now.

Beginning with the End is a Power Move

It Forces Sustainable Growth: When a CMO builds a department that requires their constant presence to function, they haven't built a system; they've built a job. A succession-mindset CMO builds a marketing machine that can outlast them. This is exactly what Boards and PE firms look for: Scalability.
It Aligns Personal Brand with Business Impact: If your goal is to become a CEO, your current 90 day plan shouldn't just be about "brand awareness"—it should be about P&L mastery and operational efficiency. Knowing your exit path dictates your current priorities.
It Mitigates "Tenure Anxiety": The 40-month average tenure isn't a failure if you’ve spent month 1 through 39 grooming a successor and hitting the milestones required for your next move. It changes the narrative from "I hope I don't get fired" to "I am here to achieve X, so I can go do Y."

By trading tenure anxiety for a succession mindset, you transform from a tactical manager into a strategic architect. A 40-month tenure shouldn't be a countdown to an exit; it should be a mission timeline to build a scalable marketing machine and groom the talent that will run it. Whether your Next is the CEO’s office, a Private Equity partnership, or a high-impact fractional career, the goal remains the same: build something so robust that your departure is a graduation, not a funeral.

Start planning your end today, because that is exactly how you master the beginning

Where to Spend Your Experimentation Budget for Maximum Impact

Thu, 26 Feb 2026 13:45:06 GMT

Nick Turner, CEO at Dreamdata, recently argued that CMOs and heads of marketing should reserve 10% of their budget for experimentation. I could not agree more. However, once that budget is secured, the immediate question arises: what should your first experiment be?

The fashionable answer is often "AI, AI, and AI." While AI is essential, focusing solely on it ignores the broader landscape and risks producing cookie-cutter solutions. If you are accountable for marketing spend at a B2B organization, you should consider a more nuanced approach. Use your experimentation budget to deploy strategies that are data driven, AI powered, and human centric.

Depending on your company thesis or the brand you steward, you may choose to deploy one or all of these strategies in your initial tests.

Of course, I have skipped over the most difficult hurdle: securing permission from your board or CEO to spend 10 % of your budget on initiatives that may not immediately generate pipeline or revenue. The solution is simpler than it appears. Do not ask for it; as Nick suggests in his blog, demand it. To borrow from my previous writing, you must incorporate experimentation into the "yes to only" culture you are currently defining.

This requirement should be non-negotiable. If you find yourself forced to negotiate, use the opportunity to bring "shadow marketers" in from the cold. By demonstrating that the marketing organization is willing to experiment and lead, you build internal credibility and show the rest of the company what modern, agile marketing looks like.

Shift from Cost Center to Growth Engine

Tue, 24 Feb 2026 15:14:30 GMT

Some late winter thoughts for marketing professionals. Are you still operating with a "Traditional" mindset, focusing on single source attribution, broad reach, and treating marketing as a cost center? Or have you embraced the "Dynamic" approach, driving multi-touch influence, targeted engagement, leveraging AI for SEO, and operating as a true growth engine?

IMHO The future of marketing is about:

Influence over just attribution
Targeted Engagement over broad brand awareness
AI-driven Answer Engine Optimization over simple keywords
Strategic Focus ("Yes to Only") over high-volume, low-focus activity

Positioning marketing as a Revenue Driver rather than an expense
It's time to adapt, innovate, and drive measurable growth. Where do you see your organization on this spectrum?

The Growth Spectrum: Where Does Marketing Move the Needle?

Tue, 10 Feb 2026 16:15:00 GMT

The Growth Spectrum: Where Does Marketing Move the Needle?

Most leaders treat marketing like a growth dial. They assume that if they turn it up, revenue will naturally follow. This is where friction with finance often comes in as well because of an expectation that revenue immediately follows investment. But many find themselves frustrated when pouring money into SEO or social ads does not result in an immediate sales spike. Usually, the problem is not the creative or the budget. It is a fundamental disconnect between their marketing tactics and their actual growth model.

Scaling impact in the age of AI requires more than just better ads. It requires a Digital Thread that seamlessly connects between your marketing automation platform(s) where engagement lives and your CRM where revenue lives.

Marketing’s impact is a spectrum of assistance. To get the best return, you have to know if you are building a transit system, guiding a tour, or acting as a private concierge.

Marketing Dependent Growth: The Public Transit System

In high volume, self serve businesses, marketing is the vessel that carries the customer from point A to point B. Because there is often no salesperson involved, there is a strong, direct correlation between marketing investment and revenue growth. In this world, your unit of trust is social proof. AI transformation here is about efficiency and identity. By using AI to validate data and resolve identities, you ensure the person clicking the ad and the person buying the subscription are recognized as the same individual. Success is a math game where AI-driven personalization fixes messaging gaps in real-time to keep the trains moving.

Marketing Enabled Growth: The Guided Tour

In the mid-market space, particularly B2B; marketing does not carry the customer alone. It provides the maps that make the journey possible. Here, marketing investment is an important contributor to a mix of investments that drive growth. This is also the case in a small division or a larger enterprise. Think of a product brand inside a services company or a services brand inside a product company.

The Digital Thread is vital here to optimize influence. AI can predict which specific case studies or whitepapers will move a deal from "interested" to "won" based on historical efficiency. Marketing creates the qualified demand that a sales team then walks to the finish line. Without this AI driven air cover, your sales team is trying to lead people through the wilderness with no map.

Sales or Relationship-Driven Growth: The Private Concierge

For high-ticket enterprise contracts, the journey is exclusive and high-stakes. In this world, investments in traditional demand generation (like click-here ads) have almost zero impact on growth. Instead, investments in brand have significantly more impact. You do not find a high-end concierge through a pop-up ad. You find them through reputation. Marketing’s role here is to be the lighthouse: a signal of prestige and reliability. In an AI driven world, we no longer claim to own the lead. Instead, we use the Digital Thread to prove that we empower the journey, providing the brand authority that makes a million-dollar handshake possible.

The Bottom Line: Moving from Cost Center to Growth Engine

Alignment is your secret weapon. A company trying to provide concierge-level service for a $20 app will go bankrupt from the overhead. Conversely, trying to sell a million-dollar contract with public transit marketing makes your brand look risky.

Measurement is only as good as the data behind it. By connecting the Digital Thread, you move marketing from a cost center to a growth engine. Before you sign off on next quarter's budget, ask yourself: Are we running the trains, mapping the tour, or acting as the concierge?

Unlocking Growth: How Marketing Can Say "Yes to Only" What Matters

Mon, 02 Feb 2026 15:34:05 GMT

There have been many discussions on LinkedIn and in the real world about the challenges of marketing teams that never tell their business “No”. And we have all been there! It is tough to say No. Humans are wired to say yes; we want to be seen as the hero and liked by the CEO or the Board.

This challenge is also compounded now that the eager business leader who always knew they could do marketing (I mean they took the class at Sloan or Haas or Thunderbird) is now inundated with slick marketing (irony) from every LLM tool vendor about how that solution can remove layers and layers of cost while driving boundless growth.This is not a nefarious plot, business leaders are faced with a hard truth, the board only cares about proof of revenue and profitability growth; so they are trying to use the new AI tools to gain an advantage in one or both of those areas. And if the marketing team says No; the business will just use AI to get what they want and it will be just as good. (I assure you I will write about this at a future date)

In this context it is very easy to build a say “ Yes to everything culture” as a way of demonstrating the value of marketing. But this is just reinforcing the incorrect meme that marketing is an order taking cost center. Even if this culture feels good; it rarely drives growth long term.

And this is not just my salty take. In 2023 the Journal of Marketing coined the term the Digital Janitor Trap to highlight how a reactive Yes culture forces teams to prioritize politics over performance.

How to Fix the Problem: Create a “Yes to Only” Culture

So how to fix this problem…Create a “Yes to Only” what matters culture.

Marketing teams can transform from reactive order takers into strategic partners by using data to ground their refusals in business reality rather than personal opinion . Create a “Yes to Only” culture that ensures that marketing has the ability and leadership support to say yes to only the strategies or tactics that are aligned to business goals and where marketing’s scope of influence will drive accretive value to the brand or generate pipeline by validating positioning with buyers.

This evolution requires changes in measurement, operational processes, and leadership mindsets but will drive growth. Here are some keys to this change:

Quantify Capacity and Costs: Utilize data to demonstrate current workload and the cost of unplanned tasks using tools like dashboards to show capacity levels and prompt data driven trade off discussions.
Implement Business Case Literacy: Employ formalized business case templates and a "Yes, If" framework to evaluate incoming requests, pushing for data on estimated ROI or customer problem-solving before committing resources. This is for all levels in marketing from the intern to the CMO.
Use OKRs as a Strategic Shield: Filter all activities through established Objectives and Key Results (OKRs), ensuring that only requests directly advancing pre-agreed strategic goals are prioritized, thereby protecting company resources.
Leverage Data Driven Storytelling for Alternatives: Instead of flatly refusing, use historical performance data to show more effective alternatives (e.g., algorithmic SEO over keyword stuffing or always on digital sales rooms over brochures) and strategically redirect stakeholders towards proven solutions.
Shift to Revenue and Growth Metrics: Justify prioritization by aligning marketing efforts with high-level financial metrics like LTV or profitable acquisition cohorts, demonstrating revenue impact and reducing "goodwill funds" that lack clear financial returns.

The Path to Sustainable Growth

These methods help to depersonalize refusals and ensure that the team's efforts remain focused on high-impact objectives, ultimately optimizing resource allocation and project quality. This isn't just to make the marketing team happy, this is a recipe for building a sustainable growth engine. It also provides a roadmap for where AI can help Marketing build Invisible Advantages and Sales provide Always On validation. This allows marketing leadership to help focus an AI eager board or executive in the right places

The Brand Problem That Isn't: Solving the Sales-Marketing Gap with AI

Tue, 27 Jan 2026 14:03:13 GMT

The Brand Problem That Isn't

Tell me if you have lived this experience. A salesperson says something to the effect of “marketing is not my deals”. This is usually part of a discussion with a marketing leader about a brand problem.

Marketers usually just roll their eyes and assume it’s a convenient excuse for a missed quota. But here’s the kicker: The sales person is not wrong. They are just using the wrong words.

They don’t have a brand problem; they have a validation and positioning problem. In marketing, we equate "Brand" with the top of the funnel: the transition from anonymous visitor to known lead. We measure awareness. But sales reps live at the top of the bottom of the funnel. They don’t need more people to know the name; they need the market to validate why they belong in the deal at all. But when a solution is not positioned properly it is easy to say that the brand is misaligned.

Resolving the Conundrum

The good news is marketing and sales can use collaboration and AI technology to position solutions and validate the brand. Here is how Marketing and Sales can resolve this friction by delivering what actually moves the needle at different stages of the sale.

Marketing: Building invisible advantage

Become the AI Answer: Focus on seeding technical white papers and verified data where large language models train to establish entity authority. This transition ensures your brand is positioned as the suggested winner when buyers use AI to generate procurement summaries.
Engineering Surround Sound Trust: Activate your technical experts in dark social spaces such as private Slack groups and niche newsletters where traditional reps are not present. Contributing high-value insights in these forums builds a default preference for your solution within the hidden rooms where decisions are actually made.
Algorithmic SEO Everywhere: Optimize your digital footprint for answer engines like Perplexity and Gemini rather than just traditional search engines. You must ensure your brand remains the cited authority whenever a buyer asks an AI to compare the top vendors in your specific category.

Sales: Tools to remove friction

Autonomous Always-On Sales Assist: Use AI agents to offload administrative grunt work and map the buying committee before you even engage. Lean on these agents to handle technical queries during off-hours so you can maintain a zero latency sales cycle without being tied to your desk.
High-Impact Digital Sales Rooms (DSRs): Stop sending static emails and instead direct every stakeholder to a persistent, collaborative workspace pre loaded with ROI and security data. Monitor the real-time intent data these rooms provide to time your outreach exactly when a prospect Finance or Legal team begins their review.
Validation Assets: Replace generic case studies with video clips that show peers solving the specific technical hurdles your prospect faces. In the final decision phase, deploy live sandboxes and third party reports to provide the unblockable evidence needed to secure executive signatures.

The Bottom Line

As technology continues to change the buyer's journey, great branding and proper solution positioning can create an environment where the sales call feels like a formality. Validation and Positioning enabled by AI can eliminate the ubiquitous “Brand Problem” discussions between marketing and sales and ensure the buyer is on the way to being sold before the first Zoom call.

Prove Marketing’s Influence and Impact to the C-Suite

Tue, 20 Jan 2026 22:15:03 GMT

Show the marketing contribution to business growth.

In my last post, I discussed the importance of defining your scope of influence . Eventually, the rubber meets the road, and we have to answer the question: How do we actually measure that influence?

Modern marketing leadership requires speaking the language of the boardroom and the boldness to take credit for the influence marketing has on business results. This is not the trope of vanity metrics vs business metrics. I am of the opinion that there is no such thing as a vanity metric; the metrics for measuring the impact of specific marketing tactics is important to how marketing stewards the brand and drives demand. But this blog is about how to pick the right metrics to influence the C-Suite and the board.

To do that, we need to answer four fundamental questions with absolute clarity and report on them with confidence.

Are we in the room?

Measuring our influence on the pipeline

We need to answer a simple but critical question: Of all the active opportunities in our pipeline right now, how many have actually engaged with us? This tells the story of your total potential future revenue. When you can show that a significant portion of the pipeline has read our thought leadership, attended our webinars, or visited our key service pages, you prove that marketing isn't sitting on the sidelines. It demonstrates that your brand is "in the room" for the deals that matter. This also validates elements of our content strategy.

Did we help cross the finish line?

Connecting marketing activity to actual revenue

Credibility is earned when the deal gets signed. While we must look at pipeline potential, the ultimate proof lies in the paycheck. We need to identify exactly what percentage of our closed-won revenue interacted with marketing touchpoints during the buying cycle. This is critical for internal alignment. It shifts the conversation away from viewing marketing as just "top-of-funnel noise" and establishes it as a consistent factor in why clients ultimately sign the contract.

Are we identifying the right opportunities?

Checking the efficiency of our efforts

This is the bridge between generating interest and generating income. It’s not enough to just influence deals; we need to influence the right ones. This comes down to evaluating quality control. We need to ask: Are the deals marketing touches closing at a higher rate than the ones we don't? If the answer is yes, we know we are attracting high-intent buyers. If the answer is no, it’s a signal that we need to pivot. It forces us to stop focusing on volume and start focusing on delivering better value to our sales and partnership teams.

Where are the leaks?

Diagnosing the health of our conversion rates

We need an organizational health check. How effectively do we turn any opportunity into a customer? This goes beyond just marketing; it’s a business diagnostic. By breaking down our conversion rates by industry, practice area, product line or service offering, we can find the "leaky buckets." Perhaps our message resonates in healthcare but falls flat in financial services. This insight allows us to stop guessing and fix specific messaging or sales enablement gaps with surgical precision. It also eliminates finger pointing here, this makes message development a team sport.

Why do these matter?

Moving from marketing activity to business influence requires a fundamental shift in perspective. By answering these four questions, you stop reporting on what marketing did and start proving what marketing enabled . This isn't about defending a budget; it’s about demonstrating that marketing is an indispensable engine of the revenue process. When you can clearly articulate how you enter the room, help close the deal, target the right opportunities, and plug the leaks in the funnel, you earn the confidence of the C-Suite and a permanent seat at the strategic table.

The Death of Attribution and the Rise of Influence

Tue, 13 Jan 2026 15:14:09 GMT

Marketing Attribution is Dead. Long Live Influence.

Every marketer grapples with the same challenge: proving the value of their strategies. And often, this justification needs to happen repeatedly for the same investment…..ring a bell? Too frequently, we fall back on last-click or first-touch attribution as our only defense for spending. Simple, clear, and increasingly, totally wrong.

These days, buyers are maneuvering through a maze. They’re leveraging AI driven searches, engaging with chatbots, and consuming content across public and dark social channels. Think about all the chatter happening around your brand in private messaging apps, forums, and online communities long before a prospect raises their hand to talk to your sales team. The straight line from marketing lead to sales driven purchase (which may have not always been straight, but that is the subject of another blog) is gone. Replaced by a complex, multi-touch web.

Here’s the kicker: If we keep measuring marketing solely by what it sources like who clicked first or last, we’re missing the vast majority of its real value. We’re stuck in the past while our buyers have already moved on to the future.

It's Time for a New Language: From Attribution to Influence.

Instead of asking, "Who brought this lead through the door?" we need to ask: "How much of our entire sales pipeline has been nurtured and shaped by our marketing efforts?"

This is where Scope of Influence becomes essential. Picture your total sales pipeline and identify every part of it that marketing has touched, be it a LinkedIn ad, a webinar, a valuable whitepaper download, or even just a thought-leadership post. Also you need to look at the difficult to measure dark social channels. Analyzing those private shares via messaging apps and emails is challenging, but there are tools that leverage AI listening to track mentions on public platforms like forums, blogs, and social media that can give inferences. These tools can infer trends and provide limited visual analysis of closed channels. Dedicated solutions often combine broad listening with user generated content from private sources or focus on influencer-driven insights to give you a more comprehensive but not totally complete view of your brand’s influence.

By capturing and being bold enough to report on the total volume of your pipeline influenced by marketing, you reveal more of that picture and show something crucial: Marketing isn't just a “brand shop” or a siloed "lead gen factory." It’s a dynamic, strategic powerhouse that amplifies every sales conversation, hastening deals and fostering trust long before sales is engaged.

As buyers maneuver through the AI-driven world, the value of your marketing goes far beyond touches and attribution; it's about the cumulative impact of every digital interaction, cultivating relationships and credibility along the entire buyer journey.

Sounds great but what are the metrics you need and how? Come back for part 2.

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The Best AI Native Marketers are Just Great Marketers

The channel has always been the hype. The fundamentals have never changed.

The television lesson

The direct mail lesson

The social media lesson

What this means for AI

The 2026 Manifesto: Stress Testing David Ogilvy’s 38 Rules for the Age of AI

AI Didn’t Break Advertising: It Just Exposed Who Forgot the Fundamentals

The 4 New Principles for the AI Era

Dark Social Dividend: Turning Measurement Blind Spots into Revenue Velocity

Every new CMO starts with a 90-day plan. They should also bring a succession plan.

The Missing Part of the Plan

Beginning with the End is a Power Move

Where to Spend Your Experimentation Budget for Maximum Impact

Shift from Cost Center to Growth Engine

The Growth Spectrum: Where Does Marketing Move the Needle?

The Growth Spectrum: Where Does Marketing Move the Needle?

Marketing Dependent Growth: The Public Transit System

Marketing Enabled Growth: The Guided Tour

Sales or Relationship-Driven Growth: The Private Concierge

The Bottom Line: Moving from Cost Center to Growth Engine

Unlocking Growth: How Marketing Can Say "Yes to Only" What Matters

How to Fix the Problem: Create a “Yes to Only” Culture

The Path to Sustainable Growth

The Brand Problem That Isn't: Solving the Sales-Marketing Gap with AI

The Brand Problem That Isn't ﻿

Resolving the Conundrum

Marketing: Building invisible advantage

The Bottom Line

Prove Marketing’s Influence and Impact to the C-Suite

Are we in the room?

Did we help cross the finish line?

Are we identifying the right opportunities?

Where are the leaks?

Why do these matter?

The Death of Attribution and the Rise of Influence

Marketing Attribution is Dead. Long Live Influence.

The Brand Problem That Isn't