Attribution: Everyone Wants Credit, No One Deserves It
Marketing’s favourite crime mystery.
A murder has been committed — the crime? A spike in sales.
Around the boardroom table, every channel takes the stand:
Search: “I closed the deal.”
Social: “I made them want it.”
TV: “I planted the idea months ago.”
Email: “You’re all just lucky I followed up.”
And in the corner, the CMO — tired detective — clutches a Google Analytics report like a lie detector test.
The False Idol of Precision
We’ve spent a decade worshipping attribution models,
pretending a UTM tag can decode human behaviour.
But attribution isn’t science.
It’s politics with prettier charts.
Everyone’s fighting for a bigger slice of the same conversion,
and the dashboards keep lying — beautifully.
The Irony
The more “data-driven” we become,
the more emotional we get about the data.
Last-click becomes religion.
MMM becomes mythology.
And “data wins” are just gut feel in spreadsheet form.
Attribution didn’t kill intuition —
it just automated it.
Every model lies.
But some lies help you allocate better,
experiment smarter,
and admit what you don’t know.Because in marketing, everyone wants to be the hero.
But the truth?
Sales was an inside job.