Why last-click attribution quietly killed your brand budget
18 November 2021
A Surrogate Chief Data and Analytics Officer provides analytics leadership on a fractional basis: setting the roadmap, putting a value on each action, assessing tooling independently, and representing the function to the board, without the organisation carrying a permanent executive salary.
The gap this fills is specific. It is not a shortage of analysts, and it is rarely a shortage of tools. It is the absence of anyone senior enough to decide what not to do.
The symptoms
Organisations with this gap tend to look the same from the inside:
- Data sits in silos and there is no consistent method for deciding which problems get solved across the business.
- Tools have been bought sincerely and are used at a fraction of their capability, because each was purchased to solve one team's problem.
- Requests for analysis arrive by seniority of requester rather than commercial value.
- Nobody can state, in dollars, what the analytics function returned last year.
- The response to any new limitation is to evaluate another platform.
The last one is worth dwelling on. Buying software is a legible action with a clear owner and a defined budget line. Deciding priorities is uncomfortable, political, and produces nothing you can demonstrate at a steering committee. So organisations do the legible thing repeatedly, and end up with more capability and less clarity.
What the engagement actually involves
An analytics roadmap with dollars attached
Built jointly, not delivered. Every action carries a priority and an estimated return, so the sequence is arguable on commercial grounds rather than on whose team asked loudest. This is the first deliverable in every engagement of this type we run, because everything else depends on it.
System optimisation before system replacement
Identify the current value gaps, then work out how to close them with what is already licensed. Most organisations are further along than they believe and paying for considerably more than they use.
Tool selection without a commercial interest
We hold no reseller agreements and take no vendor commissions, so we can assess the market on merit. The tests we apply are whether your team can operate and improve it without us, and whether it will still be fit for purpose in ten years rather than ten months.
Representation upward
Someone has to explain the analytics function to a board in the board's language. That is a different skill from doing the analysis, and it is usually the one missing.
Companies with analytics leadership at the C-suite have been found to deliver substantially better profitability than those without. One Kearney analysis put the gap at 120%. Leadership, not tooling, is the variable that most consistently separates them.
Source: Kearney, The Value of AnalyticsWhy fractional works here
The work is front-loaded. Establishing direction, auditing what exists and building the roadmap is intensive. Maintaining direction is not. It is a standing commitment measured in days per month, plus presence at the decisions that would otherwise be made without an analytics view.
A full-time executive hire flattens that curve at the wrong level. Either you overpay for maintenance, or you appoint someone junior enough to be affordable and reproduce the original problem one layer down.
The end state
The point is not to remain embedded. It is to reach a position where the organisation has a roadmap it owns, an operating model that assigns analytics work by value, and enough internal capability that the fractional role becomes advisory and then unnecessary.
We would rather be the consultancy you stopped needing than the one that solved the same problem for you every year.
Want this applied to your business?
Tell us the decision you are trying to make. If we are not the right people, we will say so and point you somewhere better.
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