John Wanamaker said it more than a century ago, and it still stings: “Half the money I spend on advertising is wasted; the trouble is, I don't know which half.” The difference is that today, the question has an answer. With a connected conversion funnel and an end-to-end attribution model, you can finally see which half is working — and that is the foundation of results-driven marketing.
Wanamaker had no dashboards, no pixels, no CRM. We have all three, plus more — and in most companies, his question still goes unanswered. Three reasons why:
Auction and recommendation algorithms decide where most of your digital budget actually goes. You know exactly what you spent. What you bought, who saw it, and whether it made any difference — that's anyone's guess.
Campaigns live on one platform, leads on another, and the sale itself often closes offline — never connected back to the ad that started it. So nobody can tell you the actual cost of customer acquisition.
Companies buy world-class tools and use a third of what they can do. Meanwhile, cookie and privacy restrictions make the data those tools rely on less useful. In the end, marketers drown in a sea of endless data points with very little concrete insight.
Half the money I spend on advertising is wasted; the trouble is, I don't know which half.John Wanamaker, marketing pioneer (1838-1922). More than a century later, the question is still open.
After auditing marketing operations across Chile and the Americas, these are the patterns that explain the missing half:
Keyword auctions get more expensive. Organic reach shrinks under a flood of AI-generated content. Recommendation algorithms decide who sees what, by rules nobody outside the platform knows. The result: your budget has to grow every year just to stand still.
Shaky attribution models, sales that close offline, no visibility into which ads perform on which channel — and dashboards full of clicks and impressions instead of revenue. The monthly report describes traffic. It says nothing about return.
Whoever executes the campaign also reports its success, in vanity metrics: reach, impressions, engagement. If you don't measure your own funnel, your vendor gets to define what success means — and the incentive loop turns perverse fast: “Campaign underperforming? Spend more.”
Google stopped being the one-stop shop for search years ago. Questions now get answered on YouTube, Instagram, TikTok and through AI. Yet most companies still buy paid search results and banners like they used to buy TV: broad, blind, and hopeful.
People are starting to skip search entirely and just ask AI. If ChatGPT doesn't mention you, you don't exist. Your best defense against the AI takeover is everything that AI can't scrape or hand to your competitors: your customer data, your relationships, your connected funnel, your method. Our C-level cheat sheet on generative AI.
At Rabit, we don't start by buying tools or reorganizing your team. We start by squeezing what you already own and measuring what nobody measures today — and only then do we scale up with new or upgraded digital assets. By this logic, our action plan is to:
Quick performance gains on your current stack, without buying anything new: tighter workflows, better ways of working, an upskilled workforce, and smarter bids, formats and creative processes.
Deliverable: quick wins across the campaign stackConnect the whole funnel — from the ad to the closed sale, even when that sale happens offline — and build the attribution model that tells you which campaigns actually produce revenue.
Deliverable: a connected funnel with attribution up and runningWe design and run campaigns Agile-Marketing style: short sprints, A/B and multivariate tests that don't burn out your customer base. Your team learns by doing and the knowledge stays with you, not with the consultants.
Deliverable: the methodology installed in your teamMarketing structures, processes and stacks built for the next five to ten years — where AI and digital are catalysts for the next wave of results.
Deliverable: a prioritized transformation roadmapYou'll never get a perfect answer — 100% attribution is a myth. But you can get close enough to reality to do something better: stop treating marketing as a cost, and start treating it as an investment you can trust.
We'll coordinate a free marketing assessment based on your digital assets and organize a 40-minute call with actionable results. Sounds too good to be true? Maybe — but no purchase is required.
