By János Moldvay, VP of Measurement at Funnel
In years gone by, brands could start running an advertising campaign, use third-party cookies and digital attribution, and see, fairly clearly, whether their marketing had been a hit with consumers or not.
You would put out a digital ad for shampoo, interested potential customers would start visiting your website and you would know which corner of the internet they have come from. Your ad has been particularly effective on Facebook. You may even have a database keeping all of your marketing data in one place and you start hatching a strategy to sell more coconut oil shampoo by increasing your visibility on other platforms.
Today, many marketers are essentially operating blind, unable to both measure the effectiveness and — perhaps more importantly — the efficiency of their expenditure. The reliance on incomplete, inaccurate, or misleading data further skews understanding of what drives results. This growing blindness threatens not just campaign performance, but the strategic direction of entire marketing departments, and by extension the stature of the CMOs.
Yet, the market is shifting as once-maligned data measurement techniques are coming to the fore once again to combine with new methodologies.
Flying blind: the issue of ‘Dumb Data’
The industry faces a perfect storm of challenges that have dramatically reduced visibility into marketing performance. Privacy regulations, platform restrictions, and technological shifts have combined to create an environment where marketers struggle to see the impact of their investments.
Digital attribution — understanding which marketing touchpoints drive conversions — has become exponentially more challenging. Meta, Google, Apple, TikTok and other “walled gardens” reduced cross-platform visibility, with each claiming full credit for conversions, introducing significant bias while disrupting traditional attribution models that marketers have relied on for years.
The ideal is for marketers to access accurate information on the efficacy of their marketing spend. But far too many professionals now operate with what can only be described as “dumb data” — information that appears valuable on the surface but actually misleads decision-making. One survey of North American CMOs found that only 28% have substantial confidence in their data. This data often derives from siloed platforms, lacks proper context, or fails to account for the complex, multi-touch nature of modern customer journeys. It’s like trying to plan a holiday based solely on your Instagram feed — sure, Bali looks amazing, but try getting there in peak monsoon season.
Pair this with the proliferation of platforms and data streams, and the problem is exacerbated. The volume of information flowing from advertising campaigns, social media interactions, website analytics, and CRM systems leaves marketers drowning in data yet thirsting for insights.
The false dichotomy
To recover our marketing vision is to look at the bigger picture: seeing the forest for the trees. This firstly means that marketers can engage in both brand and performance marketing; big brands have historically done this but have been hampered by different teams having different KPIs to understand their specific impact on consumers.
This self-imposed division contributes to the current blindness. By focusing exclusively on performance metrics that provide the illusion of being easily tracked, marketers developed tunnel vision, missing the broader effect of their efforts, particularly in brand building.
However, the challenges in digital attribution, combined with limitations in data-driven algorithms, have pushed the industry back toward methodologies unaffected by tracking restrictions or privacy regulations: marketing mix modelling (MMM).
MMM is a statistical analysis methodology that considers how various factors — both marketing and non-marketing, online and offline channels — impact your business performance. MMM is especially helpful in the current climate where digital attribution doesn’t provide that full picture of the customer journey and customers’ privacy is protected.
A 2024 survey from EMARKETER and Snap Inc. found that over 60% of American marketers who spend over $500,000 per year on digital advertising want better and faster MMM to upgrade their measurement strategies, indicating a wider shift to the methodology. Despite this, MMM on its own is not enough to give marketers the full picture, due to its “small data problem” (only 730 data points when including two years’ worth of data) insights from MMM can be unreliable and volatile.
Restoring vision
Older, data-driven algorithms that worked well before privacy regulations restricted data availability can no longer be relied upon. Instead, forward-thinking brands are exploring new channels, investing more in branding initiatives and prioritising creative innovation. With fewer data-driven targeting options available, advertisements must be more compelling to effectively engage audiences.
Tools like MMM — across online, offline, brand, and performance channels — take in more of the media mix and measure these creative advertisements’ impact. By analysing more of the marketing ecosystem, marketers can break down silos between teams, connect efforts toward shared business goals, and focus on backend metrics like profit rather than relying on biased, dumb data from attribution tools.
To boost spending efficiency, marketers should combine, or triangulate, attribution models like MMM and multi-touch attribution (MTA) — which takes all of the touchpoints on the consumer journey into consideration and assigns appropriate credit to each — together with experimental testing. Often AI-driven, these models are becoming more accessible and affordable, so CMOs will not be left in the dark.
This mindset shift is already underway and it opens the door to more strategic and creative insights. At Funnel, we’re finding this an encouraging time as holistic approaches cut through the challenges of siloed data to help marketers better attribute their spending and see not just the trees, but the entire forest of their marketing impact.
Marketers can avoid becoming dinosaurs reliant on prehistoric attribution methods: those who still do so might as well be doing budget planning with cave paintings. Marketers who can look beyond immediate conversion metrics and have a clearer vision of the broader ecosystem of influence that shapes consumer decisions will thrive in this new era.
