What you need to know:

• Greg Stuart, the CEO of the MMA Global, says multitouch attribution should be a key focus of marketers, worldwide.
• Last touch is a "stupid metric", and when CMOs use stupid metrics, they lose standing with CEOs and CFOs, he suggests. There is “zero relationship between click through and sales”.
• Meanwhile, the chasm between marketers who focus on brand versus performance needs to be bridged, says Stuart, with some smarter CMOs calling brand building something more business-like, less "unicorn". 

CMOs should invest in multi-touch attribution models that tie targeted spend to business outcomes, the head of a global marketing industry body says, warning click-through rate has “zero” relationship to sales and risks diminishing marketers' standing with senior management.

Greg Stuart, the CEO of the MMA Global – a global trade body with 800 members like Google, Facebook, Ebay, Snapchat, Twitter, Salesforce and Adobe, says reconciling brand and performance is key to marketers being taken more seriously at a C-Suite level.

“It should be a validated model in its relationship to the actual performance of the business,” he told Mi3.

“My job is to help improve the stature and gravitas of CMOs. And when we use stupid metrics we look stupid to CFOs and CEOs, who know better. And if we don't spend the shareholders money properly – that's criminal at some point.

“You have to get to multi-touch attribution. That is the answer. You have to be able to figure out, what are the actual media contributions? And then run the mathematics and statistics to understand.

“Where it gets a little complicated, though, is what are the actual outcomes?”

Stuart, a former CEO and president of the Interactive Advertising Bureau, said last click attribution became the easy solution that people could measure.

“There is zero relationship between clickthrough and sales. I'm serious. The dumbest fucking thing the industry ever came up with,” he said.

“There was a study done a few years ago where they placed blank ads into pages. The click through on those blank – pure white ads, no message, nothing – was exactly the same as a click through other ads.

“So the problem is that agencies created a simple world and their simple spreadsheet, and that was last click.”

The best metric is lifetime value, Stuart says. But it is "extremely difficult" to measure and each business must determine a measurement that works for its own purposes.

In the automotive industry, measuring media contribution related to those who do a test drive or configure a car on a website might be a good proxy to sales, he says.

“That moves the ball forward. In the case of retail, that they visited a store where that product was sold. That might be a good proxy.

“So clickthrough is meant to be a proxy measure to ultimately the right outcome."

Unicorns and suckers

Marketers are split into two camps: those who prioritise brand and those who prioritise performance, Stuart said, both of which are valid to an extent. But the tension between them defines the market.

“If you talk to the brand people, brand marketers, they'll see the performance people are sucking the air out of the room. They're ruining the future of the business. They don't care about long term value of customer building as a contribution to the business,” Stuart said.

“If you talk to the performance people, they think the brand people are for the rainbows, unicorns and have no goals and don't know what they're doing. There's probably a bit of that that's both right. But we need to understand the relationship.

“The problem is there is no off-the-shelf methodology today to assess brand versus performance marketing and optimise against it.”

Brand, he believes, has become a dangerous word – especially in the broader C-suite.

“I think it's become a word without meaning that CFOs hate,” he said. “I have one of my CMO board members who uses the words 'maximum multi year returns', which is, in essence, brand.”