Marketers Ruin Everything (Again)
1-minute read
The title of this post is a quote stolen from Gary Vaynerchuck—a marketer who many would argue has ruined everything.
The “death of traditional attribution” is just a re-branding of how to observe the way people connect dots to find—and eventually, buy—a thing.
Human behavior is human behavior. And within the context of marketing, it’s only ever come down to successfully mapping to it.
Some marketers on LinkedIn are just really good at, well, marketing. They've branded the attribution conversation and rallied tribes around methodologies for observing and articulating how people make buying decisions.
It's fascinating when you step back and look at how it’s all unfolded on LinkedIn.
Opinions and philosophies about measuring attribution have created sub-cultures of passionate groups who battle it out over who’s right and wrong. (This is hilariously short-sighted when you think about it. We’re talking about multi-variable human behavior which is as unpredictable and ever-changing as it gets. So to think that you’re right and that someone else is wrong in this area is as limiting and flawed as thinking gets. But I digress.)
That said, if you genuinely want to go all "dark funnel" on this thing (or whatever the hell you prefer to call it), you have to be willing and available to talk to a lot of people. Sourcing swaths of ongoing qualitative data is what proves that approach out. So prepare yourself. This takes a lot of work and patience.
Here’s the hard truth: Without investing in sourcing “the qual” and discovering what approach to attribution truly works for you as a marketer, you're just a minion blindly following a LinkedIn marketing influencer. Sure, you might be good at parroting a bunch of sexy terminologies. But knowing how to do anything of material value in the real world requires more than posting vague and agreeable marketing platitudes on LinkedIn.
Real-world results stem from actual skill and accountability. If you don’t have them, you will be exposed.
P.S. As far as discussing this stuff on LinkedIn goes, there’s only one O.G. in my book. Everyone else is just talking an agreeable game for the Likes without ever giving credit to the person they learned it from.