Measuring what matters when the cookies are gone and the dashboards lie.
The attribution conversation has become a séance. We sit in a darkened room, pass our hands over a dashboard, and ask the spirits of the third-party cookie which channel really did it. The dashboards reply, in a voice we've trained them to use, that it was the channel we already wanted to spend more on. Everyone nods. No one is entirely sure what just happened.
This talk is a practical reset: what attribution actually is (an estimate dressed in a percentage), what it has never been (truth), and how to run a marketing program in a world where the measurement infrastructure you grew up with is being slowly removed without ceremony.
Expect specifics, not a doom-loop. We'll cover the three measurement postures that survive the cookieless transition, the org structures that support each, and the sentence you can use in your next QBR to stop a bad attribution argument before it starts.
Marketing-mix modeling, geo experiments, and the underrated “good enough” stack. When each makes sense, what each costs, what each cannot tell you.
Six questions you can run against your stack on the flight home. If three of them have no answer, the dashboards are doing fiction.
How to defend a marketing budget without leaning on charts you don't believe. Includes the one chart the CFO actually believes.
A back-of-envelope framework that beats most attribution platforms for the channels that matter, and admits it where it doesn't.
Tell me the date, the audience, and one true sentence about why you're putting on the event. That's the whole intake form. I read every email. I reply within a day or two — three if it's a Monday and I'm at the rink. There is no agent. There is no booking platform. There is just a guy with an inbox and a calendar.
Founder of Seapoint Digital, a small marketing agency in Maine. In marketing since 2008. Running Seapoint since 2011. He gives roughly a dozen talks a year on marketing, AI, and the regional agency life.
Based in York, Maine. Office in Kittery, where the bridge is and the coffee is better. Plays Beer League hockey on Mondays. Not the William Cutrer who wrote the books; Google has been informed and remains unmoved.