After eight years at Google, advising clients who collectively managed over $2B in ad spend, I’ve decided to walk away.
I didn’t leave because the tech is failing—Google’s AI-powered bidding is more sophisticated than ever. I left because of a staggering paradox I saw inside the world’s most successful performance marketing shops: The more we spend, the less we seem to know about what’s actually working.
This isn’t just a technical glitch. It’s a capital allocation crisis. According to a McKinsey Global Marketing & Sales Survey, 75% of companies still rely on last-click attribution, despite the industry consensus that it’s fundamentally flawed. Even more telling? Only 52% of CMOs can successfully demonstrate marketing’s impact on business outcomes.
The View from the Trenches
Most of my time at Google was spent with lead aggregators—companies whose entire existence depends on unit economics. These are the “smartest guys in the room” when it comes to performance.
Yet, even here, I saw a structural failure that no platform tool could fix:
- The Fragmented Data Trap: Internal silos and inconsistent partner data make a “single view of the customer” nearly impossible for most enterprises.
- The Last-Click Addiction: Companies stick to last-click not because they believe it’s accurate, but because their data systems are too messy to support anything else.
- The Measurement Gap: I watched advertisers spend millions optimizing for last-click conversions while incrementality studies showed 20–30% of that spend was essentially wasted.
Three Worlds, One Insight
My career has been a strange mix of three disciplines:
- McKinsey (Strategy): I learned how to structure big problems. But I also saw that most marketing orgs lack a systematic way to diagnose why their measurement is failing.
- Investment Banking (Accountability): In the capital markets, nobody accepts a projection without a validated methodology. Yet marketing—often the largest discretionary spend on the P&L—frequently operates without that same rigor.
- Google (Platform Mastery): I realized that platforms are designed to grade their own homework. If you feed the AI fragmented data, it just amplifies your mistakes at scale.
The SAVD Thesis: Marketing is Capital Allocation
We are entering an era where “platform expertise” is no longer the differentiator. The advantage now belongs to those who treat marketing spend with the same discipline as an investment banker treats a capital allocation.
This is especially true for Private Equity.
The Bain & Company Global Private Equity Report notes that commercial initiatives (like customer segmentation and pricing) can lift EBITDA by up to 15%. But most portfolio companies can’t quantify marketing’s contribution to that lift because the infrastructure simply isn’t there.
Why Now?
Three forces are turning measurement from a “nice-to-have” into a requirement:
- The Privacy Cliff: As cookies disappear, the gap is widening. Think with Google research shows that organizations prioritizing first-party data and Media Mix Modeling (MMM) are 2X more likely to exceed revenue goals by 10% or more.
- PE Accountability: With exit multiples harder to predict, the McKinsey Private Markets Annual Review shows that investors now demand measurable EBITDA uplift as a minimum expectation.
- The Democratization of Data Science: The incrementality testing that once required a $100k consulting project is now accessible through lightweight, open-source frameworks (like Google’s Meridian). The barrier isn’t the cost of the math anymore; it’s the fragmentation of the data.
Bridging the Gap
At SAVD, we solve this measurement gap not just with better math, but by solving the coordination problem between the CMO’s goals and the CFO’s requirements. This is enabled by providing the measurement layer that makes marketing a defensible line item on any P&L.
We provide the “investor-grade” infrastructure—incrementality testing, predictive LTV, and unified data—that proves your strategy is actually working.
If you’re a CMO tired of defending “brand awareness” to a skeptical CFO, or a PE Operating Partner looking to de-risk a portfolio company’s growth plan—let’s connect.
The era of “vibes-based” budgeting is over. It’s time for marketing to speak the language of capital.
Next Steps
Ready to understand where your measurement gaps are costing you?
SAVD offers a 30-minute Marketing Measurement Diagnostic where we identify your highest-impact measurement opportunities and quantify the EBITDA at risk.
Book your audit at savd.ai/audit