Fixing the Disconnect Between Brand, Demand, and Dollars

Most marketers know there’s a measurement problem—but few understand just how deep it goes.

Charlie deThibault does. With a background in finance, risk, and trading, and experience leading measurement strategy at Oracle, Charlie brings uncommon clarity to a chaotic space. Today, he helps enterprise brands realign their marketing and sales efforts to prove value and reduce waste.

Here’s what we learned from our conversation.

Waste Lives at the Bottom

Marketers are pouring too much money—and too much trust—into the bottom of the funnel.

Why? Because that’s the only place attribution “works.”

“We’ve decided to evaluate marketing with attribution,” Charlie explains. “But attribution only works at the bottom of the funnel. It tells you how—not why—buyers buy.”

This obsession with attribution leads to misaligned incentives. Marketers are penalized for doing the right thing—investing in brand-building, awareness, and long-term growth—because those initiatives are harder to measure.

The result? A skewed spend that favors trackable (but low-impact) tactics over meaningful brand work.

Not All TOFU Is Created Equal

Just because something claims to be “top of funnel” doesn’t mean it’s building a future customer base.

Charlie calls out shallow awareness plays—like low-effort LinkedIn campaigns with product shots masquerading as brand building. “That’s not creating affinity,” he says.

The real goal of top-funnel marketing is “Creating the buyers of tomorrow.” That requires more than education. It requires emotional connection, trust, and a sense of reduced risk—especially in B2B.

“Both B2B and B2C buyers purchase based on perception,” he explains. “You don’t need to explain Coke. You just know it.”

Performance ≠ Proof

Misalignment between sales and marketing often boils down to this: attribution stories don’t match reality.

“Sales will hear a completely different reason for purchase than what’s shown in multi-touch attribution,” Charlie says. “And when sales is bringing in the revenue, their version tends to win.”

That creates tension—and can tank marketing’s credibility with leadership.

Worse, when teams compete for credit instead of sharing insight, they miss the bigger picture: most buying decisions happen long before attribution kicks in. The buyer’s mind was already made up.

Alignment Starts with Honest Metrics

The measurement mess is structural.

Enterprise teams are siloed by channel and incentivized by incompatible KPIs. SEO claims credit for traffic driven by social. Paid search looks great because it follows untracked brand activity. And the CMO’s dashboard is cluttered with platform ROI that tells half the story—at best. Effective marketing dashboards should show marginal return instead.

Charlie’s fix is to show the marginal return.

“Platform ROI is useless without context,” he says. “It favors bottom-funnel campaigns, ignores diminishing returns, and hides wasted spend. Show how much more return you get with more spend—and when that flattens out, shift budget up the funnel.”

Speak Finance. Not Marketing.

Want credibility with your CFO, Charlie suggest ditching the jargon.

“Brand affinity sounds vague to finance,” he says. “But if you say, ‘We’re creating the buyers of tomorrow,’ that’s a language they understand.”

For B2B marketers, start by building a strong relationship with sales. That opens the door to finance—and gives your marketing efforts a shared goal and stronger proof.

“Marketers influence. Sales closes. But if you’re not aligned, everyone loses.”

When Dashboards Lie

If your CAC is rising, margins are shrinking, and your reports still look good—something’s wrong.

Charlie sees it all the time: leaders relying on “good-looking” dashboards while the business quietly bleeds.

“When budgets are based on multi-touch attribution, marketers are stuck playing the game they’re given,” he says. “They need leadership to recognize the limits of those tools—or nothing changes.”

Some leaders never make that leap. But those who feel the pain—the misaligned metrics, the stalled growth, the rising costs—are ready to listen.

Charlie’s first move is “Show me your budget. I’ll tell you what you believe.”

Final Thought: Don’t Be Known. Be Known for Something.

It’s not enough for customers to recognize your name. “Everybody knew the brand,” Charlie recalls a sales rep saying, “but nobody knew what we solved.”

That gap—between awareness and meaning—is where most marketing goes to die.

If your funnel is bloated at the bottom, confused at the top, or at war with itself in the middle—it’s time to rethink your metrics. Start by measuring what matters, not just what’s easy.

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