More traffic. More tools. More team. Less revenue. The reports show channel performance improving. Finance sees those channels losing money. Something between measurement and reality is broken and you are making expensive decisions based on data that does not reflect truth.
The pattern I see is this. Attribution model over credits channels appearing late in customer journey. You increase investment in channels getting credit. Cut investment in channels creating demand. Three months later performance collapses because you starved what was working whilst feeding what was just harvesting existing intent.
This is not a marketing problem. It is a commercial system problem. The measurement layer is telling a story the financial layer contradicts. Nobody has authority to reconcile them.
If your CFO questions digital investment return, the problem is not finance misunderstanding digital. The problem is digital cannot explain why increased investment produces worse outcomes.
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