Marketing Needs a Moneyball Moment

I've been around baseball for most of my life. My dad loved the sport and played throughout school, so naturally, my parents put my sister and me in softball growing up.

Years later, I ended up working for one of the most influential mentors I've ever had. He also happened to love baseball and had direct connections throughout MLB. And because apparently a normal backyard wasn't enough, he had an indoor batting cage at his house.

So yeah, I've spent some time around baseball.

But what I learned wasn't just how the game is played. I learned about strategy, performance, mental strength, equipment, personal development and what it takes to repair something when it isn't working. More importantly, I learned how interconnected all of those things are.

Baseball is interesting that way. It looks incredibly individual. One person steps into the batter's box. One pitcher stands on the mound. One player fields the ball. Statistics get attached to individual names for almost everything that happens.

But nobody wins a baseball game alone.

It is an individual sport built around a team outcome, which is probably one of the reasons I love Moneyball so much.

It isn't the stars that make me love the movie. It's the strategy.

At its core, Moneyball is about what happens when someone is willing to look at an industry that has operated a certain way for a very long time and question whether it has been valuing the right things.

The more I look at modern marketing, the more I think we need our own Moneyball moment.

Baseball Didn't Have a Data Problem

There's a scene in Moneyball that has always stuck with me. Billy Beane starts asking Peter Brand about the system he has developed for evaluating players, and Peter is noticeably cagey about explaining it.

I get it.

He isn't sitting on another spreadsheet. He has developed a different way of seeing the game.

Baseball already had an enormous amount of data. The sport had been collecting statistics for generations. Teams had scouting departments, historical performance records, reports and people who had spent their entire careers evaluating talent. The industry wasn't suffering from a lack of information.

What Peter was challenging was how that information was being interpreted.

The traditional system had established its own definition of what a valuable baseball player looked like. Certain statistics mattered more than others. Certain characteristics were prized. Players who fit that model commanded attention and money, while other players could be overlooked because they didn't fit the accepted definition of value.

Peter's system looked at the same game differently. Instead of accepting the industry's assumptions about what a valuable player should look like, the system focused more closely on what actually contributed to winning.

That distinction matters.

And it's where I think the connection to marketing becomes incredibly relevant.

Modern marketing doesn't have a data problem either. If anything, we have the opposite problem. Google, Meta, LinkedIn, your CRM, your email platform, your website analytics, your SEO tools and your social platforms can give you more data than most organizations know what to do with.

We have dashboards for our dashboards.

The problem is that having access to numbers doesn't mean we know which numbers matter.

Every platform can give you data. So can a scoreboard.

The advantage comes from knowing which information actually helps you win.

Marketing Has Its Own Scouting Room

Another one of my favorite scenes in Moneyball is the scouting-room conversation. Billy sits with longtime baseball scouts as they discuss potential players. These are experienced baseball people who have spent years evaluating talent, but listen to some of the reasoning being used.

A player looks the part. Another doesn't. Someone has the right build. Someone has confidence. At one point, a player's girlfriend somehow becomes evidence in the evaluation of the player himself.

Billy isn't arguing that these people know nothing about baseball. He's questioning the assumptions underneath the way they've always assigned value.

Marketing has its own version of that room, and I've sat in it more times than I can count.

We need to be on this platform because our competitors are there. LinkedIn leads are too expensive. Organic social doesn't generate revenue. Email doesn't work like it used to. Google is obviously our strongest channel because it generated the most conversions. We need more followers. We need more traffic. We need more impressions.

Maybe some of those conclusions are right. But I want to know what they're based on.

If a company has seven dashboards, multiple platforms taking credit for the same conversion, disconnected systems and a CRM containing only part of the customer journey, I'm not ready to conclude that a channel doesn't work because one metric looks bad.

Take something as simple as cost per lead. If Meta generates a lead for $42 and LinkedIn generates one for $180, LinkedIn looks expensive. If that's where the analysis stops, shifting budget toward Meta seems perfectly rational.

But what happens if LinkedIn leads become qualified opportunities at three times the rate? What if they close faster or produce substantially larger deals?

Suddenly, the $180 lead doesn't look so expensive.

The original conclusion wasn't necessarily irrational. It was based on an incomplete understanding of value.

That's a very Moneyball problem.

Marketing Is a Team Sport Disguised as Individual Statistics

This is where my understanding of baseball and my understanding of marketing really collide.

We tend to evaluate marketing channels the same way we evaluate individual players. Paid search gets its statistics. Organic social gets its statistics. SEO gets its statistics. Email, display, remarketing and LinkedIn all get their own performance reports.

Then we line them up and decide who performed.

The problem is that the customer never experienced your marketing that way.

A prospect might see an organic LinkedIn post and never click it. Three days later, they search your company on Google and visit the website. They leave. A week later, they see a remarketing ad, click through and read a case study. Later, an email reaches them. Eventually, they search for the service they need, click a paid search ad, return to the website and book a meeting.

The opportunity closes and paid search gets the conversion.

Did paid search win the customer?

Maybe. It certainly played a role. But making the leap from "paid search recorded the conversion" to "paid search created the customer" ignores everything that happened before that final click.

And this is where marketing organizations get themselves into trouble. We make budget decisions based on the portion of the customer journey we can easily see, then act surprised when performance changes after we remove something we decided wasn't working.

Baseball taught me a long time ago that individual statistics exist inside a team outcome.

Marketing works the same way.

Somebody Has to Get on Base

One of the ideas at the heart of Moneyball was that Oakland couldn't build its roster the same way the richest teams did. The A's didn't have the resources to chase every player the market had already decided was valuable.

They needed to find value other teams were missing.

That meant paying closer attention to what actually contributed to creating runs, including something deceptively simple: getting on base.

I think marketing needs to understand its own version of getting on base.

Not every channel has to hit the home run.

Organic social may be where someone first encounters the brand. SEO may bring them back while they're researching a problem. Remarketing may keep the company visible while they're considering options. Email may continue the conversation. Paid search may eventually capture the person when they're ready to act.

Those contributions aren't identical, and they shouldn't be measured as though they are.

If we only reward the channel that records the final conversion, it's very easy to convince ourselves that everyone who came before it was unnecessary. We cut organic because it isn't producing enough direct leads. We pull back on SEO because it isn't moving fast enough. We reduce remarketing because its last-click return doesn't look as strong. We question email because it isn't directly creating enough opportunities. That's last-click attribution at work, and it consistently produces incomplete conclusions.

Then performance starts slipping somewhere else. Paid search gets more expensive. Conversion rates soften. Branded search weakens. Acquisition costs start creeping up.

Everyone starts looking for the problem.

Sometimes the problem is that we changed the lineup without understanding how the team was working together.

The player we benched may not have been hitting home runs.

Maybe their job was just getting on base.

Attribution Should Change What You Do Next

Marketing attribution is the process of understanding which marketing interactions contribute to a customer outcome so businesses can make better decisions about where to invest next. This is why attribution matters so much, and I think marketing has made the concept more complicated than it needs to be.

Attribution isn't valuable because it tells us which channel gets credit for the conversion. It's valuable because it helps us understand how each channel contributed to the outcome. I don't just want to know where the percentages landed. I want to know what moved the customer forward, what influenced the decision and what that tells us about where we should invest next.

The better we understand that journey, the smarter our next investment decision becomes.

That means understanding more than where a conversion happened. We need to understand where customers first encountered us, what brought them back, which messages or creative moved them forward, what built trust, what created qualified opportunities and, ultimately, what became revenue.

That's also why I don't think attribution should live exclusively in a rearview mirror.

Reporting tells us what happened. Good attribution helps explain how it happened. Growth Intelligence should tell us what we do about it next.

That's the progression.

The goal isn't simply to produce a more sophisticated report about last quarter. It's to use what we've learned to decide where the next dollar, the next piece of creative, the next campaign and the next hour of our team's time should go.

Being Everywhere Isn't a Strategy

Somewhere along the way, marketers became obsessed with being everywhere.

Every platform. Every channel. Every new trend. Every shiny object that someone announces businesses absolutely have to start using immediately.

But most businesses don't have unlimited resources. They have finite budgets, finite people, finite creative capacity and finite time.

So did Billy Beane.

Oakland couldn't outspend the Yankees. If the A's evaluated players exactly the same way the richest teams did and competed for exactly the same talent, the economics were never going to work in their favor.

They had to get smarter about value.

Businesses should be thinking about their marketing investment the same way.

The question shouldn't automatically be, "Where else should we be?"

The better question is: Where should the next dollar go if we want to increase our probability of winning the next customer?

Those questions lead to very different marketing strategies.

One encourages expansion for expansion's sake. The other forces you to understand performance, contribution and opportunity before deciding where to invest.

And you can't answer the second question if you can't follow the ball.

Data Doesn't Replace the Human Part

There is one part of the Moneyball conversation that I think gets oversimplified: the idea that the lesson is simply data good, instinct bad.

I don't buy that.

I've been around baseball enough to know that numbers don't tell you everything about a player. Mechanics matter. Mental strength matters. Coaching matters. Preparation matters. Equipment matters. Development matters. Team dynamics matter. Knowing when something is off and needs to be repaired definitely matters.

Marketing isn't different.

Creativity matters. Strategy matters. Experience matters. Understanding people matters. Brand matters. Timing matters. Knowing your customer absolutely matters.

A great marketer will see things a dashboard never will.

The point isn't to replace human judgment with data. It's to make human judgment harder to fool.

That's an important distinction because Growth Intelligence isn't about handing decision-making over to an algorithm. It's about giving experienced people a more complete picture so they can make better decisions.

Billy Beane still had to build the team.

The information changed how he did it.

What's the Team's Record?

Marketing loves individual statistics just as much as baseball does.

Google has its ROAS. LinkedIn has its CPL. Organic has its traffic. Email has its conversions. Social has its engagement.

I want those numbers. They matter.

But I also want to know the team's record.

Are we creating qualified opportunities? Are we building pipeline? Are we acquiring customers? Are we generating revenue? Are we growing?

That's the scoreboard.

Everything underneath it should help us understand why the scoreboard looks the way it does and what we should change to improve it.

Moneyball didn't change baseball because someone discovered statistics. Baseball already had plenty of statistics.

It changed baseball because someone was willing to question whether the industry was measuring the right things, valuing the right players and spending money accordingly.

Marketing is sitting in that same room right now.

We have more data than we've ever had, more platforms than we've ever had, more dashboards than we've ever had and more ways to measure almost everything we do.

Yet plenty of companies still can't confidently explain what actually helped them win their last customer.

That's insane to me.

Don't tell me you need another channel. Show me who's getting on base, who's advancing the runner and who's driving them home. Show me where we're wasting at-bats and where we're creating runs.

Then show me where we're putting the next dollar.

That's attribution. That's Growth Intelligence. And that's how you build a marketing lineup designed to win.