Being "data-driven" is silly

You’ve probably noticed that pretty much every corporate YouTube channel is hot garbage.

Even the biggest, smartest companies essentially treat YouTube as a dumping ground for any random webinar, sales video, product announcement, etc— AWS’ is a particularly brutal example:

But I’m not here to beat up AWS’ YouTube channel, as fun as that might be, because this is just one example of a much bigger pattern: B2B companies absolutely suck at brand marketing.

B2B companies being horrible at anything involving personality or creativity isn’t news, but I think it’s worth looking a little closer because I do think there’s a solution.

The fundamental issue is what I call “attribution blindness.”

Meaning, the only way they know how to measure the value of marketing is bottom of the funnel metrics like new signups or sales. “We’re data-driven. We don’t care about vanity metrics,” they’ll say with a straight face as they keep grinding out content that gets 75 views and drives zero revenue.

So it’s not actually that they’re “data-driven” at all, because the data shows that their ideas are terrible 💀

It’s this:

The only way they can think about marketing is through the lens of a dashboard in Google Analytics (or their other dashboard of choice). If it doesn’t show up in GA, it doesn’t matter. And if it DOES show up in GA, it matters more than everything else.

And that “attribution blindness” how we end up with things like the AWS YouTube channel— no vision for anything other than trying to “drive results” in the most clumsy, obvious way possible.

Which ironically, tends to NOT ACTUALLY DRIVE RESULTS!

This kind of simple, first-order thinking has two big problems:

1. Many of the things that drive immediate results eat away at your ability to drive even BIGGER results in the long term.

Eg running a super aggressive sale and sending 3 emails a day to everyone on your list— yes, you’ll see a revenue bump from that, but at what cost to your relationship with your audience?

2. And vice versa: Many of the things that create the biggest long-term advantage take a while to pay off, and won’t show any ROI in the short term.

For example this project we did at CreativeLive a few years back: 30 interviews in 30 days with people like Jared Leto, Brene Brown, Mark Cuban, Gary Vaynerchuk, etc:

And since we had to travel to do all these interviews, our all-in costs were definitely into 6 figures for the series.

The standard B2B playbook would have been to hoard all this content on our website, email gate it, and spam everybody who was foolish enough to give us their email— but fortunately we had Chase Jarvis as our CEO, who is one of the best brand marketers and B2B salespeople on the planet (and he raised $60 million for us from Chamath, Reid Hoffman, Richard Branson, etc).

So instead, we put the series on his YouTube channel and podcast— all free and ungated, and with barely even any mention of our product or even the company.

Most of the links weren’t even UTM’d 😱 An unforgivable sin according to B2B!

But here’s the twist:

Yes, we lost money producing the series. But how much did it elevate our brand to have our CEO sitting across from people like Richard Branson, Sir Mix A Lot and Brene Brown?

And what did that elevated company brand unlock for us? Partnerships and 7 figures of business with companies like Starbucks, Apple, Microsoft, Adobe, and Red Bull among others, over the next 18 months or so.

Easily a 10x bigger upside than if we’d been dumb enough to run the “gate and spam” B2B playbook.

My point:

As the saying goes, not everything that matters can be measured, and not everything that can be measured matters.

Play the long game, and don’t let yourself end up in the B2B Cringe Hall Of Fame like the AWS YouTube channel 🙃

PS- I did a few podcasts recently, if you’re somehow not sick of me:

• The Niche Marketing Podcast

• Marketers Do Coffee

• Create & Earn