Most B2B marketing organizations have two audiences for data: the CMO, who's allocating budget and presenting upstairs, and the marketing team — led by the director — who's running the actual campaigns. They need different things. The field has been pretending they need the same thing. That's the source of a lot of the current confusion — and most of the fight between MMM and multi-touch attribution.
Set direction. Allocate budget across major buckets. Defend marketing's investment to the CFO and the board.
Bucket-level. "More into demand gen, less into events." Is marketing working as a whole?
Strategic views. Confidence the engine is running. A defensible story upstairs.
Translate the CMO's direction into actual campaigns. Run the work. Allocate within the buckets. Show the CMO what's working.
Campaign and segment-level. "Which campaigns are pulling pipeline this month?" Where to lean in next week.
Touch-level customer journey data. Segment trends. Surge detection. Answers in days, not quarters.
Both audiences need data. Both audiences need different data.
The current debate about marketing measurement — "attribution is dead, MMM is the future" versus "MMM doesn't fit B2B, use multi-touch" — makes more sense once you notice which seat each side is writing for.
The MMM voices are mostly writing to the CMO. Portfolio-level outputs match the CMO's decision space. Clean knobs, big buckets, quarterly cadence — that's what an MMM produces, and it's what the CMO can take to the board.
The multi-touch voices are mostly writing to the marketing team — the director and the people they lead. Touch-level data, segment trends, week-to-week operating signals — that's what the team needs to actually run the work.
Each side is right about its audience. The mistake has been pretending one tool serves both — and then arguing about which one tool is the right one. There is no one tool. There are two audiences.
Some organizations are genuinely well-suited to MMM. Large consumer brands with hundreds of millions in spend, broad channel portfolios that include TV and out-of-home, short purchase cycles, and the organizational capacity to act on portfolio-level recommendations. For those organizations, MMM is the right answer at the CMO level, and the methods deserve the respect they get.
Most B2B marketing teams don't fit that shape. Fewer channels, longer cycles, smaller volumes, smaller teams. That doesn't mean those teams are behind — it means a different kind of measurement actually fits their situation. The trouble starts when methods built for the first shape get recommended as universal. For more on this specifically, the MMM companion document has a self-assessment that helps you figure out whether your org fits the profile.
In B2B, you have something organizations in the first world genuinely cannot have: customer-level journey data. Every touch, every campaign, every account, traceable to specific deals. That's the foundation.
From that one foundation, you can build two presentation layers:
Both views, one underlying truth. The team and the CMO are reading from the same map at different altitudes. That's the answer most B2B marketing organizations need — and it's only recently been buildable, thanks to better tooling and pattern recognition on top of touch-level data.
We build for the marketing team — the director and the people they lead — because that's where strategy meets execution, and serving them well produces views the CMO can lead with. One foundation, two views. That's the design philosophy we think fits B2B.
We're holding these views loosely, as with everything else in this publication. If you see this differently, tell us. The goal is to get this right.