Has Attribution Stifled Good Marketing?
It’s a question that’s begging to be asked in a world that is obsessed with being “data-driven.”
If anyone gets it, we do. RevOps is 50% of our business offering, and at its core, RevOps is all about using data to understand “what’s working” with your sales and marketing efforts.
However, since PR accounts for the other 50% of our work, we also have the luxury of seeing firsthand what effective PR can do for a business. And if you don’t already know, PR is notoriously one of the hardest activities to measure — but it can also make or break an organization.
We May Have Gone Too Far
The truth is, we’ve definitely over-rotated on the need to attribute every single activity to sales.
Marketing today looks less like brand building and more like math homework.
Everyone’s scrambling to show their work, creativity has to be justified in advance, campaigns are evaluated before they’ve had a chance to breathe, and if you can’t tie your activities to the pipeline, there’s a slim chance you’re even getting budget.
Attribution was supposed to bring clarity. Instead, it brought paranoia. And it has changed how CMOs operate, how CROs perceive value, and increasingly, how we discuss PR, brand, and even RevOps.
The CRO-CMO Identity Crisis
Nowadays, CMOs are being pulled into CRO territory. They’re expected to deliver short-term revenue impact, often without the context or tools to do it effectively. Brand, narrative, positioning, and education all get pushed down the priority list in favor of what’s easy to measure now.
CROs, on the other hand, are responsible for delivering hard numbers. Which makes sense, but when marketing is judged only through a sales lens, you get risk-averse teams optimizing for attribution instead of influence.
That doesn’t make marketing more effective; it just makes it extremely limited.
Attribution Was Never a Straight Line
Here’s the truth that no dashboard or dashboard owner wants to admit: buyers don’t move in straight lines.
Instead, they listen to a podcast, see a post, hear a name in a Slack thread, read a headline, forget it, hear it again, and then maybe — maybe — they take action.
Which touchpoint “worked”? All of them? None of them? Trying to isolate one as the sole reason for conversion is a fool’s errand.
This isn’t to say attribution is bad. In fact, it’s a great data point to look at when you’re trying new things and seeing what sticks. However, treating it like a science — something clean and precise — leads to stale marketing over time, because you will begin optimizing for the same rather than the surprising.
And the best kind of marketing surprises you.
RevOps Should Be an Enabler, Not a Referee
I’m sure you’re asking yourself at this point, “but didn’t you say you offer RevOps services to clients?”
Why yes, yes we do (why, are you looking?).
However, we also want to be very clear: RevOps done well should serve as the glue between marketing, sales, and customer success. It should be the team helping you connect dots — not rule them invalid.
When RevOps is used as a scorekeeper, it stifles creativity. But when it’s used as a strategic partner, it helps marketing take smarter bets. It creates space to test hypotheses, run programs that don’t have immediate ROI, and actually learn what works across the funnel.
We’re not anti-measurement. We’re anti-metrics-as-handcuffs. RevOps can and should unlock better storytelling if we let it.
PR Isn’t Meant to Convert (But It Might Matter More Than Ever)
The pressure to attribute everything has even started bleeding into PR, and that’s a problem.
PR isn’t performance marketing. It’s perception shaping. It builds credibility, surfaces your narrative in organic ways, and makes buyers want to enter your funnel. That doesn’t show up in a lead report, but it shows up in how people talk about you and whether or not they trust you.
And here’s the kicker: in a generative AI world, PR is becoming even more critical.
When LLMs summarize your company for potential buyers, they’re pulling directly from the internet. This means your press hits, your mentions, and MAYBE your blog. That earned media becomes the primary modality for how your business is understood and discovered.
If attribution made us undervalue anything we couldn’t track, AI is about to flip that on its head. The “untracked” stuff — your reputation, your story, your earned credibility — is now the foundation for how you're found, described, and judged.
As a result, PR is performing harder than ever. Not in the way most dashboards are designed to measure.
So, Has Attribution Stifled Good Marketing?
Not yet. However, in many organizations, the oxygen is thin—attribution has stifled what makes marketing effective.
The path forward isn’t to abandon attribution. It’s to put it in its place. Attribution should inform, not dictate. It should help guide decisions rather than limit them.
Because good marketing doesn’t always come with a clean data trail, but it always leaves a mark.
