There Is No Easy Button: An Honest Conversation About Marketing Attribution with Madan Bharadwaj
What if we told you that everything you’ve been told about attribution, the dashboards, the data, the “easy” ROI, was only part of the story?
In our latest Fireside episode, Campfire founder Chris Marine sits down with Madan Bharadwaj, founder of ㎡ and one of the clearest voices in the world of marketing measurement. Together, they unpack one of the most misunderstood and misused aspects of media strategy: attribution.
The episode dives deep into why attribution isn’t about finding a silver bullet, it’s about triangulation. As Madan explains, “At the very center of measurement is human behavior,” and trying to reduce human complexity into a single metric or dashboard inevitably fails to capture the full picture.
Instead of chasing the illusion of precision, Madan advocates for a more realistic and more useful approach: treat measurement as a decision support tool. Use multiple lenses, from platform data to incrementality testing to post-purchase surveys, and triangulate your way toward better, braver, more informed decisions.
Here are a few highlights from the episode:
Last-click ROAS isn’t the truth, it’s the billboard outside the store. Just because a conversion followed an ad doesn’t mean the ad caused it. Attribution without incrementality can be dangerously misleading.
Context matters more than the average. Whether your brand is focused on acquisition, retention, or brand storytelling, your measurement model should be bespoke, not borrowed.
Causal attribution is messy but powerful. From live studies to media mix modeling, the goal isn’t perfection, it’s clarity. The best decisions come from understanding ranges, not pretending there’s one truth.
Benchmarking isn’t just about media norms. True benchmarks measure your marketing’s contribution to the business, and they change based on your scale, category, and customer lifecycle.
Operationalization is where attribution comes alive. Madan introduces a governance framework to bring together CMOs, CFOs, and data leads in structured decision-making conversations that stress-test assumptions and ensure alignment.
One of our favorite quotes from the episode?
“If you follow the ROAS, you fall off a cliff.”
– Madan Bharadwaj
Whether you’re a marketer, media strategist, or brand leader, this conversation is a must-listen. It’s not just about attribution, it’s about building trust between finance and marketing, translating insights into action, and reshaping the way we think about media's role in business outcomes.
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Chris Marine: 0:33
Hey, it's Chris Marine, founder of Campfire Consulting, and you're listening to Fireside. Today is a conversation that I've been looking forward to for a while. I'm joined by Madan Barwaj, founder of M Squared, a group that's helping marketers make sharper, more intentional growth decisions. We get into something that doesn't get enough air time attribution More specifically, why there isn't and shouldn't be one easy attribution button, and why triangulation might be the most honest approach. We've got to understand what's really working.
Chris Marine: 1:04
If you've ever questioned what from your marketing is actually driving the business forward, this episode's for you. So settle in and enjoy this conversation with Madad. One of the reasons why I love talking with you and wanted to have this conversation is because attribution is such a misunderstood piece of the puzzle, especially in media. I feel like everyone as a media agency is looking at the channel strategy and media partners to define what's working, what's not, and we're often asked prove ROI for us, and I think a lot of folks want attribution and they want it to be an easy button to push. But I know it's not that simple. You're the smartest human that I know that I've ever talked or heard speak about this before, so what makes it so complicated?
Madan Bharadwaj: 1:53
Yeah, yeah, Great question, man, and thanks for having me. It's fun, fun to be on your pod. Let's jump into it, Jump into it. The central thing that makes it complex is that at the very center of measurement is human behavior. Right End of the day, what we are trying to measure is whether we have changed somebody's behavior. So what I mean by that is, if I put a piece of creative in front of somebody, a piece of media or whatever, we're asking them for some sort of action, Like hey, you know, buy something with us or sign up for a lead form or whatever it is. We're trying to change people's behavior, and that is the code of marketing measurement, right? That's pretty hard, right. Trying to figure out how to change people's behavior, just changing hearts and minds, is the hardest job in the world. Everybody knows that right Now. That's our job as marketers. To do that.
Madan Bharadwaj: 2:42
When you're trying to measure that, it's an imperfect science, right. I mean, human behavior is super complex and we're trying to use regression techniques, incrementality testing or qualitative studies or post-purchase surveys or whatever it is. It's an imperfect measurement, right? And therefore, at the core of it, the ground truth that we're trying to measure is some level immeasurable, so we're trying to get an approximation of it right. That's the kind of central effect. So what I evangelize is that idea of triangulation, which is there is no central ground truth. We're trying to take reads of the ground truth from multiple angles, using multiple techniques and using all of it together to make one investment decision. So when we think of measurement as a decision support tool, as opposed to trying to understand the meaning of life, now, all of a sudden all of this becomes useful and we can use it to direct our marketing, investments or creative decisions, or what strategy or whatever it is, then it becomes super valuable and that principle of using multiple data points or measurement reads to drive one investment decision. That principle is what we call triangulation.
Chris Marine: 3:48
And what's the danger that you've seen when people go in all trust mode on Meta's dashboard, google's dashboard? I mean because you've opened up the hood when you're going in. You're talking about triangulation now. I mean that's a very deep dive into not just the media's performance, but also the outcomes from the business side as well. So I mean, what are the dangers of trusting those platforms as their own source of truth?
Madan Bharadwaj: 4:13
trying to sell media to you, and all of the metrics they publish is an attempt to justify the investment that you made on them, right? So what happens is this idea of last click attribution has been around for 25 years, 30 years at this point, right, and it's a very simplistic correlational approach to say that, hey, I served a piece of media and can I connect it to an outcome you had. And what has happened over many, many years is some platforms have gotten really good at connecting essentially just like correlating an impression to a conversion or a click to a conversion and it turns out that if you're online all the time, you're going to end up seeing a bunch of ads for things you buy anyway. So there's a lot of like, you know, like a billboard in front of the store effect where you're just walking into the store. You see a billboard in front of the store effect where you're just walking into the store. You see a billboard. It looks like the billboard drove most of the sales, but you were going to walk into the store anyway, so it's not very incremental right Now.
Madan Bharadwaj: 5:10
Therefore, the most classic example is retargeting and prospecting. If you look at the ROAS on retargeting, it's going to look really, really strong. But those are folks who came to your site or spend time on your site. They already know what they want to buy. They're probably trying to just like figure out, you know, maybe, some logistics before they buy it. It's not very incremental, whereas when you the very first piece of media that brought them to the site, they introduced your brand to them and created the demand, is a lot more incremental. But the conversion rates on that will be far less. Conversion rates on the lower funnel retargeting will be far more and the ROAS will obviously be, like you know, a lot stronger and lower funnel properties.
Madan Bharadwaj: 5:46
Now if you follow the ROAS, you're going to dump a lot of money into retargeting, which was obviously not incremental. It's not going to drive demand and you're going to end up like no, obviously sort of underutilizing your investments or actually wasting your investments pretty pretty meaningfully. Incrementality you can understand what's really driving change in behavior and outcomes, business outcomes for you. And when you point your investment against incrementally measured ROI, life is going to get better. But it's a little bit like exercising. It's not going to happen overnight. It's like you can do three pumps and push-ups and check your muscles right. It's not going to change overnight, but if you do it three quarters straight, without question your business will improve. But it requires discipline, that requires stay-with-it-ness type of thing, and you kind of keep at it for a period of time and absolutely the business outcomes will come.
Chris Marine: 6:34
And I think that's the biggest difference that you call out there between we talked with so many folks where I think there might be a misunderstanding between some of the upfront discovery research that helps us understand who that audience is, make sure that we're getting that billboard in front of that right audience as they're going into the store. But that research is a different piece than attribution, which is really should always be going forward. It's not this yeah, you said it. You do those three or four pushups, like you said, and then you're buff. It's like this is something, something that you track, you keep moving with you All the time. That's right.
Chris Marine: 7:06
But I think that's a misunderstanding for folks. They think like well, attribution cool, we can like get our data points and get out. Why is that? Have you worked in a case, or have an example of a case, where someone has tried to do that and where you're just not able to get the full story that?
Madan Bharadwaj: 7:19
way. That is, in fact, the most common sort of circumstance where people think because we all grew up, chris, you and I, when we grew up in industry, we grew up with Google Analytics and Google AdWords, where we never questioned attribution. Whatever was reported in the Google Analytics and AdWords dashboards was just considered to be what happened. We never questioned whether the attribution was incremental or not. It was kind of like assumed to be fully incremental and implicitly, so to speak. Right Now, therefore, as far as measurement is concerned, many marketers expect that, well, it's Google Analytics. You drop a pixel, you get a dashboard and whatever you see is the truth. Right Now, it turns out in the world we live in, it's completely like that mode and that model has gotten blown up entirely. There are really two work streams, okay, in the world of advanced attribution, as you call it, or causal attribution, one is causal studies and second is operationalization. Okay, take an example of two DTC brands. Right? Two fashion brands, dtc brands, you might assume that, hey, they are just the same. The measurement should be identical for them, right? They're both selling t-shirts online. They're both about $40, $50 million in GMV. They're about the same. It turns out when you actually get closer and closer to the business. They are very different go-to markets, one brand and the one CMO is really focused on performance marketing. She really cares about getting performance marketing right. For her it's all about retargeting and prospecting. She's really trying to figure out what is the right incrementality for prospecting. How much can I invest in it? How much can I scale meta? How much can I scale shopping? That's what she's focused on. You walk over next door to another brand and that CMO is like well, dude, I really don't care about new customer acquisitions, all about retention for me. If I don't keep these customers on longer, I mean I don't care if I get them on and I don't have a business. So she is really focused on LTV measurement and longer term longitudinal studies to measure long term behavior and how to move behavior and all that stuff. You move to another brand right next to them. They're like I don't have that. Go to market. I'm a very brand influencer. Go to market. I'm all about inspiring people about my message and what I mean to the world and it's really upper funnel. It's very organic and influencer-led and their measurement challenges, therefore, are entirely different. In the first case, it's all about live studies and very tactical and whatnot. If you move to the second case, it's all about longitudinal LTV measurement and sort of like what we call universal holdouts on the customer file and that kind of measurement. And if you go to the influencer marketing, it's a very different, essentially different measurement around upper funnel properties and sort of like more high value actions and stuff like that.
Madan Bharadwaj: 9:54
Now if you take one approach to all three CMOs, you are almost certainly going to fail. At least two out of three will just like blow up in your face. They'll be like I don't know what you're talking about. This is not even close to the question I asked, right? What I say is that the causal studies, the studies you run to help understand and unlock go-to-market questions you have right now, are almost entirely bespoke and they're moving on you every six months. So if you run a go-to-market right now, whatever learnings you have, you're going to put that in market. Some things work, some things don't, and every six months a CMO is like rethinking her brand. I go to market calibrating. So her questions are moving on us right. So those studies, the LIF studies, the causal studies, the MMMs, what questions you're asking, how you kind of shape measurement around, that is always bespoke.
Madan Bharadwaj: 10:37
Okay, now, that's happening all the time. Think of it as research, right, that's like a sort of a stream of research. Well, underneath that is operationalization. So, every quarter, every month, quarter, twice a year, whatever is the right cadence you got to take all the learnings you have and distill them into investment decisions. You have to have the discipline to say okay, I have some questions I've not answered, some questions I've answered, but I still have to make decisions. Right, I'm investing, no matter what. So I got to translate every piece of insight and calibrate that into an investment thesis and a media mix for my brand and media mix, creative, go to market whatever it is right. So that needs to happen on a regular basis. That we call operationalization.
Madan Bharadwaj: 11:16
So this is a dashboard weekly reads, monthly business reviews, quarterly QBRs, type of thing and you kind of like, you know, take a much more like okay, let's operationalize whatever we learn. Here you're doing research. This is a lot more sort of like, you know, right, asking the right questions, coming up with a learning agenda, right test, right models. Here it is about discipline, right, executing all that insight into action. Right Now, it's a program. It's not an easy button, it's not something that you can add water and stir and, like you know, make pancakes out of. It's not there. Honestly, this is a little bit more challenging. This is like when you and I started out, you know, 20 years back. It might have been CRM, might have been like this Conversion optimization on the site would have been like this right so?
Chris Marine: 11:56
that's where we are. Well, the nice thing, too, you speaking about it in this way, is you're connecting two areas of an organization, which I think you speak really well about, which is bringing together the finance and the marketing people to speak that same language. Because when you're connecting those two, that's when you can really advance the work forward in a meaningful way.
Madan Bharadwaj: 12:14
That's right. So this is what. In the operationalization sort of area, we talk about something with governance. You and I have talked about this, chris. So there is something called a governance structure. Right Now, let's say, for example, there's a board meeting coming up next month and you have an AOP. Right now you put an AOP together and some kind of forecast or not. In the forecast you're like oh, I've used MMM and I am going to like spend a lot more on TV, right. And then you walk into the board meeting, say, hey, this is my new media mix and I'm spending all my money on 70% of my budget on upper funnel and only 20% on lower funnel and blah, blah. Right, somebody picks up some random data point Remember this study we ran? This is a post-purchase survey that says that half of the business is driven by influencers Some random data point that nobody's like thought of. All of a sudden in the board meeting, the whole AOP kind of comes falling down, and then you don't have a business case for the investment thesis. You have right, because you didn't like fully think through what are all the questions that a board would ask and anybody would ask in this situation.
Madan Bharadwaj: 13:17
We call that governance, which is once a quarter, once twice a year, whatever is the right cadence for your business. There is an actual structure for having these meetings where there is a decisions committee, a measurement committee and a data committee. The decisions committee is like the CMO and the CFO, right. The CMO is presenting a plan, the CFO is like evaluating and she's asking all the questions that the board would ask and there is kind of a mock process that goes through, the decisions, get stress tested in that environment and then, while you're testing that, you ask all the questions hey, are these models credible?
Madan Bharadwaj: 13:48
Have you taken into account the post-purchase survey? Have you taken into account that particular tribal knowledge we have? How does it overlay on the plan? We have, right, all those questions get asked in the context of the governance meeting and by the time you come out of the governance meeting maybe you had 15 decisions. Maybe seven are like rock solid and six more are like you know, not so strong, but you know you're going to, but you know how to answer this question in the context of a board meeting, right? So that process is very important, part of operationalization and we advocate and evangelize for it and we help run this program for clients. That's what operationalization is about like figuring out to activate those insights in a structured, repeatable fashion.
Chris Marine: 14:25
And part of that opera, opera lie oh man, I can't even say it. But and part of that opera opera lie, oh man, I can't even say it. But part of that is benchmarking. I think one of the common questions that we get on the on the media side is like, well, tell us what the benchmark is and you kind of spoke to this in one of your earlier responses. But it's a question that always troubles us, because we can give you the benchmark for media, but that's not the right question to be asking because, to your point, it's a moving dial. What's moving From your perspective can you define, like benchmarking? I mean and that's a two part question, because there's benchmarking and media Like, yes, I can give you the meta benchmarks, I can give you the benchmarks of, like, what your vertical is doing, but then there's a benchmarking that you're talking about which is different.
Madan Bharadwaj: 15:09
We think of benchmarks as the two multiplier benchmarks. One of the things that we do is that we've been doing this for a long time. One of the key questions is contextualizing their performance. When you are coming in and saying, meta is working well, not working well, your media overall is doing a good job, not doing a good job against what line in the sand are we talking about? So as a measurement agency and as agencies in the sand? Are we talking about right? So as sort of a measurement agency and as agencies in general? That's what we bring to the table for brands, which is brands are so focused and sort of in their own lane all the time. We can bring a more industry perspective to it and inform their execution against what's working, what's not working, what is the overall like?
Madan Bharadwaj: 15:47
For example, when I work with CPG brands, they will almost always ask the question am I spending a lot or little? I mean, what's my budget? What should my budget be right? What are my peer brand spending? It's a very common question. I'm sure you get asked all the time.
Madan Bharadwaj: 15:59
I get asked the question hey, what should media be contributing to business? Is it 15% or 85%? What is the right number right? How do I contextualize that? Right? So we bring these benchmarks where we a couple of benchmarks. One we say these multipliers we talked about before. What is a good multiplier for Facebook, for shopping, for TV, for blah, blah, blah? All those multiplied benchmarks.
Madan Bharadwaj: 16:21
So you have a starting point for that. And what is marketing's contribution to business for a brand like you? Now, for Amex, marketing's contribution may be like 2%, 3%, right. For a small emerging fashion brand, marketing's contribution may be like 85, 90%, right. But 3% on a $100 billion business is still like a massive contribution. 95% on a $6 million business is a modest contribution, right. So by trying to bring that to the table and talk about, hey, these models, this measurement we're doing, and how we're interpreting media's performance, it is where it roughly, we expect it to land. It's very surprising you land here or you're very much in the ballpark of where you are and therefore, contextualizing the risk and the decision-making around that, there's a lot of the consulting that we do and that's very important. It's not a paint by numbers, it's not an add water and stir and like. Helping brands navigate investment decisions is probably the most important sort of mandate and remit that we have as professionals.
Chris Marine: 17:19
I'm Italian, so everything comes back to food for me, and what we've talked a lot about are all these different ingredients. So what are the? And probably buried this a little bit too deep in the conversation by now. Everyone's heard us mention triangulation and all these different pieces that go into this, but can you boil down simply, like when we talk about what triangulation attribution is? Are we talking platform data? We talked about CRM and where that really where how CRM was really put on a pedestal years ago and how it's still important but what are the main ingredients when we're talking about, like, building out a triangulation attribution model?
Madan Bharadwaj: 17:54
Great, question, matt. So the framing is that before you get into triangulation, there's something called base attribution, something called advanced attribution or causal attribution. Now, base attribution is all the last click stuff which is platform numbers from Facebook, platform attribution from Facebook, adwords attribution, ispot attribution, commission junction reporting All of that is what we call base attribution, and also UTM attribution, like Google Analytics attribution, branch app attribution, appsly all of this correlational and tracking attribution. What we've come to call attribution over the last 20 years, is what we call base attribution. Causal attribution is all the statistical stuff marketing, mix, modeling, incrementality testing and, to some extent, qual studies and post-purchase surveys can be thought of as causal attribution. Right, all of these are causal attribution. And then you bring them together through something called multipliers, where you might run a platformless study. You make it very simple on meta and we might find that meta is 70% incremental or the multiplier is 70% so, which means that whatever meta is self-reporting from a last-click perspective, 70% of that is incremental. That's the multiplier. So maintain a list of multipliers for all of the channels and that's the fundamental idea of advanced attribution.
Madan Bharadwaj: 19:06
Now triangulation is the idea that let's say, for example, now you take meta, now meta has four data points right now Its own attribution that might say the ROAS is like 4.5. And the UTM attribution that might say the ROAS is like 0.5. And then the MMM read that says the ROAS is closer to 1.3. And the LIFT read that's 1.5, right. So now you have four data points that say very different things about meta. Now you can triangulate and say you know what. So my actual reverse is between 1.3 and 1.5. And the multiplier compared to their own reporting is probably 70%. Compared to UTM is closer to 120, 130%, okay, great. And now I get a sense for meta's performance. Now I can use those multipliers to report on a daily basis, weekly basis, meta's performance.
Madan Bharadwaj: 19:52
My investment thesis should be to just hold investment. Okay, it's probably not worth investing more. I probably should hold it. I should explore other channels, right, as an example of how you might triangulate, right. But setting up this framing for having the conversation is probably what helps you actually get you to the point of now. Clarity in decision making, right? You know that worst case, best case, performance all land in this place. So Meta is kind of like a good investment at this point Great. Whereas some other investment may be like very much on the other side and be like oh okay, now it doesn't matter. If I look at platform attribution, utm attribution, mmm, incrementality, everything is saying that OS is like 0.3, no more than 0.7. I need it to be at least 1.2 for me to be breakeven. So clearly, this other channel whatever it is, youtube maybe is not working for me. So I need to go back to drawing board, right? Being able to like put that together so you can have clarity in the decision-making is probably where majority of the alpha comes from.
Chris Marine: 20:46
And just to reiterate, like you mentioned, clarity, which is important, and for people to hear that we're talking and you've mentioned this before just in this conversation alone, and I know in many conversations with you and I before clarity is not perfection. There is no silver bullet, and so I think what's really important which I think you do a really good job educating folks about through your M squared club and just when you're out preaching this across the country we met at an event a couple of months ago is that you talk about how. It's definitely what you're talking about right now with triangulation. It isn't perfect, but it is better. Can you speak to like why it's better and closer to the truth? If people haven't picked that up by now, you know they probably have but like just to really put a pin in it, like, why is it closer to the truth by approaching it this way?
Madan Bharadwaj: 21:29
When I say closer to the truth, it's closer to a more optimal decision, like, for example ultimately, you're trying to translate everything back to what should I do with this thing? Should I spend more, spend less? To make it simple, right? Should I hold my budgets on meta? Should I scale my budgets on meta? Should I cut my budgets on meta? So, if you're going to simplify the decision to three levers, are all the data points we have synthesized, are they all telling you to hey, no matter how I look at this, this is a really strong investment. At least a ROAS of one or greater. This thing is 1.5, 1.7. Best case it's 2.5. Worst case, it's 1.7. It clearly is a good investment. I might break even as one. So I should really scale into this investment.
Madan Bharadwaj: 22:09
Now, the decision to invest more dollars into it is very clear. You may choose to say, well, there is some uncertainty here. I shouldn't double my investment. I should only probably go 30% more right, great. But the fact that you have now gotten clarity and certainty about your current investment and probably the decision to increase investments, very clear. You may argue whether it should be 30 or 50 or 80 or whatever, but that clarity comes through with this triangulation and the opposite could be true as well where you might say, okay, I can't tell if YouTube's good or not. Well, when I look at it, through multiple lenses, through MMM, through platform lift testing, through a geo test, through, like post-purchase surveys or last click attribution, everything says that the OS is no better than 0.3. I've looked at it five different ways. Everything is saying is that it's never going to cross one. So the decision to like go back to the drawing board on YouTube is very clear, right.
Madan Bharadwaj: 22:57
That clarity comes through triangulation, right, and it's not. It's a sort of a heterogeneous data problem. It's not as easy as I sort of make it sound. By the time you get to the players, you've kind of like had a few battle scars, right. A lot of data is like blowing up on you and it all looks like monkeys and donkeys and it can't get them all to be apples to apples. So that problem you have to solve. But that's what you know as professionals, we help solve that. Put it together in a way that can now go through a sort of a reasoning flow like I just walked through.
Chris Marine: 23:28
But that's what I appreciate from the media perspective. It gives us more confidence in making smarter sometimes not so obvious decisions, because we're only looking at set data points ourselves from a media perspective. So I love when we're able to talk about this with folks because it is giving us a deeper dive, which leads me to this next idea that I think is something maybe our industry put together where, like this is probably the wrong term, but maybe not appreciating fully the skill set of this, because a lot of the times people will come to media experts and say we'll solve all this. But I think what gets missed a lot is that this isn't just about the data. It's about how you read it, that mindset of skills. How do you help marketers think and build around this, because it is completely different than someone that's working in media or creative or brand research. How do you help people understand that skillset better?
Madan Bharadwaj: 24:30
So the need for expertise is, unfortunately, the education around that is still developing. Right, I'm constantly. There are 4 million marketers in the industry, maybe more. The percentage of marketers who actually are CMOs and marketing teams and folks who make the decisions who understand the level of expertise required to deal with measurement is no more than 10%. Okay, probably less than that. Okay, most marketers still want an easy button right, just somewhat dangerous.
Madan Bharadwaj: 24:59
But also that's kind of how we all grew up. It's not that you know, it's something that happened overnight. It's kind of how the industry evolved. We're used to looking at meta dashboards and GA dashboards and AdWords dashboards for understanding performance and when you're a small brand, that's okay. But as you grow further and further up, the level of inquiry you need to like guide those investments keeps going up. Right Now, if you've kind of made the investments along the way, then you'll kind of appreciate that. If not, then it's a big challenge. Now how do I help educate that, educate marketers? Honestly, it's a lot of like education evangelism around. What is the right approach for measuring marketing? There are only three levers right. One is media creative measurement right, those are the three big levers where you can find alpha. Now, almost all forward-thinking marketers can appreciate. Creative is obvious. Everybody understands that Media strategy.
Chris Marine: 25:51
It's been around for you know, ever so they kind of Still a little oblique.
Madan Bharadwaj: 25:57
Measurement's kind of the new kid in town, right, the new, yes, the trifecta that gives you the alpha now agencies and marketers are able to put those three things together. It's an unfair advantage today, right, if you can understand that, appreciate that and actually please start sort of like, even start the journey of like bringing those three things together in your organization and building a competency that brings measurement into your strategy and creative. All of a sudden you're going to have unfair advantage, but it's slow, I'll be honest, and I don't think many marketers appreciate the level of expertise required to solve.
Chris Marine: 26:29
Do you think within organizations, that it should live as a separate function, almost the way that finance or legal is, or should it be bundled under with creative or with media? Should it be bundled under with creative or with media? I know my perspective is, I think, because I respect it very much and I know what media is able to do. I believe it should be a separate function within an organization, but what are your thoughts on that?
Madan Bharadwaj: 26:53
The world is split on this. Chris, there are benefits in both right. The neutrality benefits cannot be understated. Like in many big organizations when I work with a Zillow or an Instacart, or like big big organizations or eBay, they like to almost put this function under finance or like a separate functions, almost like an FP&A function. That is kind of auditing marketing's contribution to the business, right.
Madan Bharadwaj: 27:15
The challenge is that it becomes siloed, which means that the insights don't flow back into marketing and creates kind of this adversarial relationship between marketing and sort of data science and now they're kind of like you know they're not trusting the results and it kind of creates all these insights eventually don't get absorbed into the execution but you get the neutrality right, whereas when you actually have it be part of growth marketing and it actually supports marketing, then it's much more integrated into thinking. But you don't get a lot of investment because now it's thought of as sort of supporting the media. It gets super underinvested because you want to get as much of your money into media as possible. Naturally, right. If I'm a CMO I want to get as much of my dollars into like efforts that touch consumers. When you talk about all the analysis and research supporting it. You're like it feels a little bit like well, okay, but I need to first get my marketing stimuli out there, so get under invested right. So there's no right answer.
Madan Bharadwaj: 28:12
In the industry today. Really, the alpha is in building neutral insights, but absorbing them into your execution and actually deploying it so it actually creates value for your insights. It's an evolving space right now. I think integrating it right is the real answer. But how should organizations organize themselves? On paper, I teach this in class. We call this the three disciplines model for marketing measurement, but I got to tell you the world is split is probably the answer.
Chris Marine: 28:42
Maybe it's my journalism foundation, but I believe that the reason for splitting is I believe in numerous sources of truth and immediately when you start to blend those I mean church and state is a very journalistic way of putting it. It's not that way in marketing, but when you start blending those it's hard to not have a little bit of bias when you're receiving that information if it's being cooked within that same team. Absolutely, but I know we're running out of time so I kind of have these might be two unfair kind of quick, lightning round questions to ask, but some of the most common questions and it's kind of double clicking into one of the areas you just touched on. But to your point about the CMO, one of the most common questions is you know what channels are driving the right ROI? What's a better way to reframe that for folks?
Madan Bharadwaj: 29:31
Another way to say that is. So, of course, when you say that, you have to say it in the language of finance. Okay, so you need to like be able to express what you just said in terms of like. Let me restate that in sort of like finance language. I would say that hey, I invested a million dollars in TikTok last quarter. It drove a contribution margin of $800,000. That's the whole business case for TikTok, right? You don't have to express it any differently. You've already said you gave me a million dollars, you gave me $800,000 in contribution margin, which means I gave you back the million and after taking cost of goods out and all the other shipping costs and whatnot, I am still putting $800,000 in profit back in your pocket, cfo. That's the whole business case for the media. Now you can do that for every line item in your media mix. Now you've made the business case for the entire investment Very quickly.
Madan Bharadwaj: 30:15
The CFO is going to turn around and be like why do you want to only take a million dollars? Why don't you take 10 from me? I'll give you 10 on TikTok. And the CMO will be like I can't deploy 10 on TikTok, I can probably deploy another 200K. Now it turns the equation. Now this looks like an ATM. You've identified that this particular thing that you're asking me to run is an ATM. Now you give me a dollar and give you like a dollar back and 80 cents back in your pocket. Like, why stop with a dollar, give me a million, like a billion right Now. How do you express that?
Madan Bharadwaj: 30:45
What is the right marketing accounting framework? To be able to say that with confidence is that it's a language we call marketing accounting framework. You break up the business into the right four clients in the business new customers, repeat customers, right. The very different incrementality. Media has a much larger role in driving new customer acquisition. A more modest role in driving retention. Okay, different products high LTV, low LTV customers. Obviously there's a lot more value in driving higher LTV customers.
Madan Bharadwaj: 31:10
But what's the mix? What's the unit economics, right? Or markets, tier one markets, tier two markets? If you've been in a market for a long time, your baseline's much larger Media's contribution is more modest than in a more emerging market where you don't have any baseline. Right? What is the natural fault lines in the business? How do you cut this up in a way that's right for go-to-market and how do you flip it and report it in language, in metrics, in KPIs, that both finance and the executive team and marketing can all align. Behind that language we don't have a gap sort of accounting and marketing right. This MAF is the equivalent of gap in marketing, where we can now report marketing in terms. Finance will actually appreciate that completely changes the transactional language between these two teams and has a huge impact in being able to push through investment decisions and strategy behind that.
Chris Marine: 32:00
So my last question that I teased up, I think you might have just answered very well there, but for CMOs that are listening, what's one thing you tell them to stop doing when it comes to attribution and one thing to start doing? I think that idea of putting this language into a CFO's terms is a great call.
Madan Bharadwaj: 32:15
Absolutely the two ways. I mean don't follow the ROAS is something that you know. If you follow the ROAS, you fall off a cliff, is a common adage. Now, that's obvious, right? If you just follow last-click ROAS, a platform ROAS or whatnot, you're going to run into a wall or run off a cliff. One of the two things is going to happen. Right, that's one that's an obvious sort of advice. Second is put MAF, the accounting framework, in so you can now talk to finance, report to finance in a way that justifies, makes the business case for investment Huge. That's the. You're going to do one thing in your in the next six months that allows you to completely transform your organization. That would be. That would be the one investment you would make.
Chris Marine: 32:53
Well, madan, I could keep going. I think everything you speak about is just fascinating. I appreciate how you bring truth and transparency, and everything we talked about today is something that you and your group are doing. So it's just fascinating and we'll have to have a part two, part three, part four.
Madan Bharadwaj: 33:11
We live in a really fun time, chris. We're obviously reshaping the industry in a way that has not been done in the last 20, 25 years, so we're obviously part of a big movement and it's a fun time to be part of it. Hopefully we get a chance to do a lot of work together and like make a small dent in the universe together.
Chris Marine: 33:27
For sure you're leading the way. So thanks for your time today. Madan Appreciate it. Thank you so much. That's a wrap on this episode of Fireside. Huge thanks to Madan for joining us and for sharing such a thoughtful perspective on attribution, decision-making and how we get closer to truth in a noisy media landscape.
Chris Marine: 33:46
Now I'll be speaking at Programmaticio in New York this September and we'd love to see you there. We'll drop a link in the event show notes here, so I want you to come find us. The whole Campfire crew will be there. Come say hello and let's keep this conversation going in person. And if you liked what you heard today, you can always reach out to us here at Campfire Consulting.
Chris Marine: 34:05
Attribution is a critical part of the work we do and M Squared is a trusted partner we work with to bring additional layers of truth and transparency to the cross-channel strategy, media planning and buying we lead for our clients clients. Now, finally, if you want to support the kind of values we talk about here, we made a responsibly different shop a few months back and really this came from a place of our clients sharing with us that they love how we wear our values on our sleeves. Well, now you can literally do that and wear them proudly. Check out shopcampfirecom and you'll find the responsibly different shop. Every piece is ethically made and a large portion of the proceeds support causes we believe in. So until next time, keep tending to the fire of positive change.
