Key Moments

00:18 – The McNamara Fallacy and Attribution Challenges

03:16 – Privacy and Decentralized Content Challenges

05:15 – Attribution’s Role and Limits

08:42 – Data-Driven Marketing Improvement

10:14 – Advising CEOs on Judging Marketing

13:01 – Marketing’s Core Role: Driving Foot Traffic

14:30 – Marketing as an Artistic Endeavor

15:10 – Why Marketing Faces Pressure

Transcript

Camela Thompson (00:00):

I see a lot of marketers struggle – particularly in the boardroom – to prove their impact on the business. What are the many factors that are contributing to this disconnect for B2B marketers, specifically in the boardroom?

Adi Hagag (00:18):

So just the biggest question. Alright, no worries. 

I’ll share something about my background. I grew up in military intelligence. To me, marketing is a mere legal continuation of doing what your NSA would do. So that’s how I view marketing. 

In that context, I would like to refer you to something that your American Secretary of Defense coined named the McNamara Fallacy or the quantitative fallacy of McNamara. Your Secretary of Defense deemed to set up the goals for the war, at least at the early stages of it – and I’m sorry this is going to get dark for a second – by literal headcount of Vietcong soldiers that were dispatched. Two problems with that. One, when you compensate a soldier based on the fact that the skull was due to the death of a Vietcong, every skull becomes a Vietcong. Second, upon every new casualty you create 10 new people that would want to join the Vietcong.

(01:35)
As a result, its’ the McNamara Fallacy. 

Let me quote something that Daniel and Yankelovich wrote about the McNamara fallacy. You’ll find it on Wikipedia and it has a reference to the actual book. But when the McNamara discipline is applied, literally, the first step is to measure whatever can be easily measured. The second step is to disregard that which can’t easily be measured or given a quantitative value. The third step is to presume that what can’t be measured easily really isn’t important. The fourth step is to say that what can’t be easily measured really doesn’t exist and this is suicide. 

So this is to sum what I think about attribution in a nutshell.

Camela Thompson (02:30):

Nailed it. 

This is resonating on so many levels and here’s why. I have fallen into the trap of having to give my team members a lead goal because that’s what we could measure at the time while we worked on the infrastructure. When we shifted to a pipeline goal because we had more visibility into opportunities and activity, the behavior changed significantly in how we thought about targeting who we were going after, and how we were refining our campaigns. 

Let’s focus a little bit on what makes this so difficult. I agree with you. It still matters. It still matters, but it is difficult.

Adi Hagag (03:16):

So there is a pincer movement – sorry to remain in the military world. There is a pincer movement on the marketer from two key factors. One is the world of privacy, GDPR compliance and things we cannot do today that we could do (and even when we could do, we didn’t actually do them properly, but there’s that). Second, we are going to the world of cannibalization of our content by external channels. 

All of our website is on LinkedIn. 

All of our website is on Facebook. 

All of our website is on ChatGPT. 

You don’t actually need to be on your website. 

And these parts together create something that might seem like someone just comes in and is so ready to sign next month or whatever. Actually, they’ve been on the boiler for the past seven months. You just didn’t know that.

(04:27)
Now we, Metadata, provide tools to make it a lot closer to reality, but we will never claim that you could legally get 100% without being Facebook. 

Like yeah, if you are Amazon, if you are LinkedIn, you could probably nail it all together down because you have zero party data of everyone and consent from everyone and you can do whatever you want to do. 

If you’re not, you’re likely going to take some approximations as a result of trend lines based on some conglomerate metrics. And still you should see this as something that is closer to anecdotal evidence than actual quantitative evidence.

Camela Thompson (05:15):

So another theory I’ll throw in the pond is that so often the VP of Marketing and CMO, they’re under pressure to use attribution to prove that they are doing as much as the other departments. So they’re trying to use this campaign optimization tool to say marketing is pulling their weight and helping sales, and I feel like it’s kind of insanity to try to point to a moment or even a series of moments and say that’s the definitive, they should get credit for the entire sale.

Adi Hagag (05:56):

McNamara, this is literally the McNamara fallacy

(05:59)
That’s being drawn upon the marketer. Literally. 

Because what you want to do is create good marketing. It’s not about generating leads. It’s to create good marketing – a brand name that every one of your targets knows. They know what you do, and know whether you are a fit for them. 

Everything else is based on something superficial. Everything else is interpretation of metrics. 

Now I know that I’m being way too postmodern. What you could do is create a lot of supportive evidence, a conglomerate of metrics that all together point to a trendline of indications based on visits and impressions and pure attribution and all of that. 

Those are telling you what’s happening. They do not tell you why it’s happening and they do not tell you which part of the happening is more important than the other. 

Because if you would imagine the happening as a chunk of a lot of different points that come together, it’s kind of a ball of interactions and indications and visits and all of the things you didn’t know that happened that are kind of the dark matter of the attribution that goes on into this ball.

(07:31)
You cannot say, oh, this point out of the wall is why we’re successful. No, this is not working. 

Now there are many, many, many tools that will help you improve and ancillary components out of that bowl and this will lead to better marketing and this will lead to better blah, blah, blah. But you don’t know what and you won’t know when it would lead to that other than the obvious. 

You know what a good lead gen campaign is. But that’s kind of neither here nor there.

Camela Thompson (08:19):

I want to make sure that people understand it – and you stated this, but I want to call it out a little bit more. There are a lot of tools that help us improve as marketers. So the difficulty doesn’t excuse ignoring the data and coming back and affirming that what we did worked or did not work.

Adi Hagag (08:42):

But it would affirm it at the singular process level. We’ve improved this one campaign. We’ve improved this one landing page. 

Now any assertion beyond is guess work. Now you are in tarot cards because we improve this landing page, we now going to have…. No, you don’t know that. You just have a better landing page. Good. 

You have a better campaign that generates more leads. 

Are they going to matriculate to better pipeline than five alternative leads from a different channel that you didn’t know about? 

No, you don’t know that. That’s my point. 

You can say that my campaign today is better than my campaign last quarter. You can say we are heading towards a good trend line. You cannot say this campaign is going to generate more revenue than this campaign or this landing page. I mean, in campaign it’s slightly even simpler, although you can only measure the ones that clicked. 

You will never measure the impact of, oh, I’ve seen your ads everywhere. Right? There’s a thing that actually happens when you have someone jump on a call and say, ‘Oh yeah, I know Metadata. I’ve seen your ads all over Facebook.’ Yeah, that’s a thing. 

But they didn’t convert from there. They converted because after that a friend told them that they’re using Metadata.

Camela Thompson (10:14):

If you were to advise a CEO on how to judge their marketing wing, is there a way to do that that makes sense?

Adi Hagag (10:28):

Yes, but understand two things. 

One, the better way to do that is to judge based on deltas and trend lines of improvement rather than the classic reverse engineering of a funnel that most anyone that’s done P&L to any degree is used to. Okay? It is highly speculative and borderline mathematically irresponsible. 

What you can do is say, this is where we are today. I want us to have these trends of improvement upon these areas. Now we can build some more serious kind of goals to measure, but I would still say don’t make these the only activities of marketing you do because you still need to think of brand. 

How do you even quantify the impact of, and CEOs are going to hate me for saying that the color of your brand, the lines in the ad, the video – you cannot measure that.

(11:56)
But if you won’t do that, bet your sweet P&L table that you’re not going to get leads because they’re not going to just drop in and be the buyer when you are buying any software. 

Let’s think about the things you do. Do I know that name? Yes. No. If no, when I go to the website, do I dig it? Is it looking nice? Is it annoying me? Do I have easy ways to converse and converse with the people that I actually want to talk to? Am I able to understand the product? 

This is the role of marketing. The role of marketing in essence. If this was not a digital role, if we were still in 1982, right now the goal of marketing is to bring traffic into the store. That’s all a marketer can commit. That’s it, sir, I’m going to bring you foot traffic into your shoe store, radio shack, whatever.

(13:01)
That’s all I can commit. 

Now you can tell me, okay, but I want that traffic to be people with wallets. I don’t want a penny pinchers in my shop. 

Cool. I can also guarantee that I can do that a lot. 

Beyond that is more of your floor and your product and your salespeople. I can help you. I can help you be better there. But my role is to bring people into the store. 

And now what is the new digital store is kind of the other question. You have your website, you have all of your digital assets and then ask yourself how quickly from each and every one of those digital assets, now my marketing is running my store in that sense, how quickly can I get each and every one of those, at least the ones that matter, your website or all five stars on G2, your whatever. 

How quickly can I get that experience to be something that I can be proud of and I know is a good font for a shop. After that you can measure generating a good front for your shop. 

Now let’s measure where the button is located here or take it a slightly, you don’t start from the measurement into the good quality marketing. This is an artistic endeavor in nature.

(14:30)

I grew up on the sciences side of everything. But marketing is an artistic endeavor in nature that we are using loads of different tools to make mechanized – but it’s still artistic. That hasn’t changed. It won’t ever change

Camela Thompson (14:54):

In a world where so many things can go wrong. Product selling, marketing. Why do we keep coming back to marketing so quickly as the problem?

Adi Hagag (15:10):

Because there’s nothing more wasteful for the shop than having no foot traffic. It’s an unfixable problem. 

If I pay a staff of 15 sales, again, we’re 1982, there’s no digital anything, right? I have, let’s say that I’m a high-end fashion gown boutique. I have 10 seamstresses on the floor. I have 10 salespeople. I have all of these electricity going on and no foot traffic. 

So what do you do? 

So you can close shop, you can do that, you can start laying off some of those things and people do that. It’s happening.

Camela Thompson (16:00):

Oh yeah.

Adi Hagag (16:02):

But then at some point, if you want to stay alive, the first thing you got to fix is how do I get more foot traffic in the door? 

Now there’s a lot of things you can do from a product to market fit. Chanel can become a low end off the rack. And actually literally Chanel had become from high-end boutique where you have all of those too and off the rack. One of the giant family of, what’s his name, Bernard, and that’s it. 

So in a nutshell, there is no fixing no foot traffic. And this is why marketing is always, will always be with a fire in their behinds to get foot traffic in the store. That’s what we are. 

The game’s the game.