SAVD by Brandformance

Last week, we shared the SAVD view on the New Age of Growth Marketing, and teased a series of posts revolving around: media cost, customers and customer value. Within that post we spoke about three key questions in growth marketing:

• How do we credit our media with getting a customer?
• How do we define and drive more customers?
• How do we drive and calculate the value of those customers?

Today, we’re focused on “How do we credit our media with getting a customer?” It’s also where most companies fall into what we call the Doom Loop.

The “Silos Problem” in Marketing

SAVD is often asked to recommend the best measurement tools. “What’s the right attribution model for my business?” In reality, the measurement tools often dictate strategy instead of validating it. Gaps in those tools and in data visibility end up as misdirected strategy. Know which tool answers which question. More importantly, know its biases and gaps – then account for them when making business decisions. The work to get the most out of measurement starts way before picking the right tools.

That’s why SAVD aligns marketing teams to the company’s growth vision. Tools, metrics and strategy work in sync. Business outcomes follow.

Why isn’t this the default already? Most businesses run marketing teams in silos. Performance has one strategy. Brand has another. Teams use different attribution models, or one team runs an incrementality test without involving the other. The result: multiple yardsticks all showing success. Senior leadership has no clear path to drive efficient growth.

Visible-impact channels get funded. Harder-to-measure channels get cut. The revenue they drive doesn’t matter; visibility does. And this is where growth begins to falter. Welcome to the Doom Loop

The Doom Loop

WARC and Analytic Partners define the Doom Loop in their 2025 report, “The Multiplier Effect: A CMO’s Guide to Brand Building in the Performance Era”: a negative spiral when companies over-invest in short-term performance at the expense of long-term brand building.

From the performance marketers perspective, every dollar spent should see the right amount of dollars back.

From the brand marketers perspective, you lose your brand if you only spend for immediate performance. 

Leadership wants tangible results mapped to marketing budgets.

SAVD helps companies avoid the Doom Loop.

Most companies leave brand marketing out of the math. Marketing relies on brand for performance. WARC and Analytic Partners found that companies cutting brand marketing budgets see revenue drop 20 to 50% (Price, Kate). Companies trying to align marketing dollars to profit are slashing budgets and putting themselves out of business.

The problem isn’t the attempt to align marketing to profit. It’s flawed measurement of that attempt.

Shortcomings of Attribution Modeling

Performance marketers love attribution reports. They assign a dollar value to each channel, which makes budget decisions easy. Who would fault you for investing in Channel A when its ROI looks higher than Channel B’s?

But attribution modeling misses the true incremental impact of each channel. It adds color to granular reporting. It does not tell you the truth

How the Doom Loop Begins

Attribution rewards lower funnel performance channels like paid search, organic search, and direct visits. They get credit as the last touchpoint. The work other channels did to move the user toward purchase doesn’t show up.

A strategy led by attribution alone cuts “non-converting” brand budgets in favor of “converting” lower-funnel channels. Slowly, the pool of high-intent traffic dries up. Without brand equity, no incremental users move down the funnel.

For a marketing leader, the key challenge now becomes: “How should the media be valued to avoid the doom loop, while continuing to understand how our dollars are performing for the business directly?”

That question opens the door to start a Growth Loop conversation!

Embrace your Growth Loop

The Growth Loop for your business aligns each marketing team’s goals, metrics and tools in service of the unified business objective.

SAVD is here to help you create your own custom Growth Loop linking strategy to tactics and measurement through the right data visibility. In the meantime, here are some key goals you can begin working towards within your marketing teams:

• Marketing team goals should encourage an atmosphere of teamwork. The KPIs of the brand marketing team should feed quality traffic to the performance marketing, creating this one team narrative on performance.
• Don’t rob one marketing team to feed another marketing team. Once there is a marriage of KPIs from the brand marketing team to the performance marketing team, the money should flow together too. Base brand and performance budgets on the value each adds to the business. Use verifiable metrics these channels can optimize within the budgeting timeframe.
• Don’t just use media mix models or attribution models alone to direct your marketing mix. Context matters. Results of one media type rely on the results of another. Use these as directional indicators, not as the budget decision itself.

Works CitedPrice, Kate. The Multiplier Effect: How Brands Unleash Full-Funnel Growth. Prophet. 2026. Link.