There’s something about the weeks after Cyber Monday that always feel like a weekend in Vegas, the dashboards are open, the narrative is loose, and everyone in the building is pretending to feel confident. And attribution remains a debated topic across the industry.
So it’s the perfect time to bring on someone whose entire career has been spent trying to answer the question nobody wants to ask out loud:
“Is any of our marketing actually doing what we think it’s doing?”
This week, Rick sat down with Trevor Testwuide, CEO of Measured, for one of the sharpest, calmest, most surgical conversations of the year. No hype. No hand-waving. No fantasy dashboards. Just a clear walk through:
how incrementality works, a word we hear a lot of.
why attribution still misleads. Crazy, in 2025.
why CFOs are better friends than marketers think. Gulp.
and why 2025 might finally be the year we tell the truth about media
This is exactly the type of episode the industry needed, even if it didn’t know it yet.
Below is what it revealed for practitioners, for leaders, and for the teams heading into NRF wondering what story to tell next.
WHAT THE EPISODE GAVE US
A year where the industry stopped arguing about identity resolution and started asking a more honest question:
Would this sale have happened anyway?
Trevor, who calls himself “a glutton for punishment” for spending 15 years in attribution, landed onstage not to sell a tool, but to dismantle the false certainty we’ve been building campaigns on for a decade.
He said this quietly, but it might be the thesis of the whole episode:
“The problem statement I’ve been chasing for so long is finally now solvable.”
Meaning:
We no longer have to pretend that ROAS means anything.
We no longer need to reverse-engineer click paths.
We no longer need to fight last-touch like it’s a Greek tragedy that won’t end.
We can finally see which media actually moves revenue, and which media just moves reports.
And with NRF around the corner, that clarity could not come at a better time.
SOME QUOTES THAT MATTERED
Here are the direct lines that anchor the entire conversation:
On incrementality:
“Incrementality is understanding if your ads are actually driving outcomes, or if the outcome would have happened anyway.”
On the death of traditional attribution:
“You might as well do no marketing if you think you can only invest in channels you can track perfectly. You can’t track any of them perfectly.”
On why last-touch persists:
“It’s simple, it’s institutionalized, and changing it is painful, but it’s still wrong.”
On CFO alignment:
“Incrementality and causality is the language of finance.”
On recalibrating ROAS:
“Just because it’s simple, doesn’t mean it’s accurate.”
On experimentation:
“The minute you show someone incremental contribution margin, the lights go on. It’s the moment the measurement finally matches how the business really behaves.”
These aren’t soundbites, they’re operating instructions, things you can work by.
THE BIG LEARNINGS
1. ROAS has officially expired.
The dashboard era is ending not because tech failed, but because it succeeded so much it cornered itself. ROAS is a measurement of activity, not impact.
2. Incrementality is the only metric that connects marketing to business reality.
If your media would have converted anyway, you didn’t earn revenue, you just paid for the privilege of counting it.
3. CFOs should co-own the marketing model.
Trevor made this clear: The teams that learn fastest are the ones where finance and marketing define success together.
4. Experimentation beats reconstruction.
The old dream was to rebuild every click path. The new reality is: test, isolate, learn, adjust.
And do it faster than your competitors.
5. This changes how we walk into NRF.
Because the story is no longer “spend more on X,” but “spend where the dollars create lift, and stop funding ghosts.”
This is the NRF narrative brands have been waiting for.
WHY THIS MATTERS (THE NRF BRIDGE)
If NRF has spent 10 years selling “more channels, more tools, more data,”
this episode is the pivot point.
Trevor’s message reframes the entire moment:
2025 is not about new places to spend, it’s about knowing what you should have never spent in the first place.
NRF will be full of AI search demos, retail media booths, and companies promising omnichannel clarity with charts that look like modern art.
But the only question anyone actually needs to answer is:
“What is the incremental contribution of the next dollar I spend?”
If you can answer that, your roadmap isn’t just better,
it’s real.
FOR PRACTITIONERS: THE 5 QUESTIONS TO TAKE INTO Q1
Where are we still using last-touch or raw ROAS to steer decisions?
What’s the first channel we can test incrementality in without political fallout?
Does finance agree with our definition of success?
Which dollars are passengers, not drivers?
If every tool broke tomorrow, could we still explain how our marketing works?
If not, this episode is your reset button.
From the Producer’s Desk
There’s something poetic about an episode on measurement feeling like an episode on honesty.
Trevor didn’t sell optimism, he sold clarity.
And in a year where dashboards blurred, where performance sagas stretched across weeks, where attribution models splintered and stitched themselves together again, this conversation felt like breathing room.
Not less complexity,
just less confusion.
A reminder that the job has always been simple:
Find what works.
Say what’s true.
Stop funding the rest.
If Jeopardy was the emotional autopsy of the year, this episode was the clinical one.
And both are pointing to the same future.
See you at NRF.
We’re bringing this language with us.
Credits - where due
Produced by my good self, Kaylea Sepulvado and Libby Dallis
Music by RYAL - the creation of the wonderful Jacquelyn Laufer and Aaron Nevezie
Show Sponsor Rithum
