“When a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure."

Marketing has been breaking that law for years.

We chase leads instead of revenue because we don't trust that we can prove the connection.

We spend more on channels we can "measure" poorly and less on ones we can't measure at all despite knowing they're impactful, all because a flawed metric feels safer than standing behind the truth.

The industry made money off that complexity + most of us went along with it because everyone else was.

The marketers who've made outsized impacts within their companies never bought into it. They had conviction.

They knew what their funnel was actually doing, not what the platforms reported.

They knew their conversion rates, the company target, and what needed to occur to get them from where they were to where they need to be.

And because they could prove it, they were trusted. Their results spoke for themselves.

When a marketer can walk into a room and say, "Here's where we are today, here's what's driving it, here's where we need to be, and here's how we're going to get there" and have the receipts to back every word of it, the dynamic in that room shifts.

Leadership stops questioning your budget and Finance starts asking what they can provide to help get you there sooner.

All of this because you've given them the one thing marketing has been failing to deliver for thirty years:

Trust.

My family has been in advertising for three generations. TV, print, and radio were the primary channels - some of the hardest to "prove" when we think about today's attribution models.

When I asked my dad how he responded when his clients inevitably asked if what he was doing was working, he replied with one word:

Sales.

That answer still hasn't changed. We've just spent thirty years pretending it has.

Affecting your business means operating with the confidence that what you're doing is working + being able to prove it every month, every quarter, as the ecosystem shifts around you.

This is a harder path to take, but one thing I can promise you is that it doesn't end with you celebrating a metric that doesn't matter in a conference room while the company misses its target.

Affect exists for the marketers who want to be a force on the business, not just a function within it.

Waitlist is open now: affect.so