Episode 9: Marketing Must Make an Economic Contribution
Host: Joe Zappa
Guest: Adam Remson
Length: 26 minutes
Published: September 8, 2026
Adam Remson and Joe Zappa discuss an urgent mission for B2B marketers: making an economic contribution to the business. Adam and Joe talk full-funnel marketing, using data to spot opportunities and grow impact, and how marketers can improve their relationships with CEOs and CFOs.
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Full Transcript
Joe Welcome to the AdTech Marketing Podcast, the only podcast exclusively devoted to the very niche topic of adtech marketing. I am Joe Zappa, and I'm joined by Adam Remsen. How's it going, Adam?
Adam It's going good. I didn't wear a hat today. I've been wearing hats on all the previous podcasts.
Joe I never did wear hats, and then I moved to Miami, and if I don't wear hats now, it's a problem because I'm bald, and the sun is very strong here.
Adam Mm-hmm. Better to wear a hat than to like slather, you know, sunblock on your head. I don't know. I think I'd prefer a hat.
Joe You heard it from Adam Remsen. Sunblock does give you cancer. He is on that version of TikTok.
Adam Hey, wait a minute.
Joe So Adam, today I wanted to talk about a topic we have been batting around a lot, which is marketing making an economic contribution to a business. I think this is a very thorny topic.
It's very top of mind for a lot of marketers, especially in-house marketers who need to prove their value to the organization to, you know, protect their own livelihood, frankly, and then especially grow their careers and grow marketing's impact in the organization.
I think that as marketers, we think of our practice as being full funnel. So it goes all the way from top of funnel, like awareness metrics, like just getting attention of the people we wanna reach, our customers and those who influence them, all the way down to what I think the CEO and the CFO ultimately care about, which is driving pipeline, right? Driving sales opportunities. And so I think a lot of marketers exist in that more like top of funnel, mid-funnel universe, especially like comms people, content marketers, brand people.
And part of what I've been reckoning with recently as a marketer myself is how critical it is for every marketer to be driving a clear economic contribution to the business and to be able to tell a story about how their work and everything fits together to do that.
So I'm curious for, you know, you've been in-house as a director of marketing, you've been on the publisher and event side, so helping, you know, marketing partners achieve their goals. You've been on the agency side. So I'm curious how you view that question and sort of what your thoughts are about how to do it.
Adam It's a really timely question because we're, I think we're in the middle of a shift going on, largely because the metrics are becoming more and more available to actually measure success for marketers, right? So I mean, first of all, I think we need a new word for marketing almost because it, it used to just be- a rather simple sort of function of a company, but now it's like spread up and down the funnel all across channels as well.
So we're talking about like many, many different responsibilities that, uh, just get thrown. "Oh, you're a marketer," right? You know, which, you know, could be growth, it could be social, like, you know. Just name it down, and there's probably ten, 12 different kinds of marketers.
So we're in this funny kinda place where there's kind of an old breed of marketers, which are kinda used to doing things more in the, you know, branding kind of, as you said, upper and mid-funnel.
Joe Mm-hmm.
Adam And then there is a new breed of marketer that's entering the, the fray as well, which is people that are measuring results and using the tools at their disposal in order to measure and drive leads and drive revenue. I think as you and I have talked about before, there are plenty of people that will raise their hand when it comes time to assign credit for revenue, new revenue at a company.
Joe Yes.
Adam And some of this like ability to actually tie back revenue to actions is kind of exposing like a little bit of a flaw, I think, in companies, which is companies often define themselves as, "We're a sales-driven organization," or, "We're a marketing-driven organization," or, "We're a product-driven organization."
Joe Mm-hmm.
Adam And that usually leads to whatever is driving, whatever is perceived as driving, as getting the credit.
Joe Mm-hmm.
Adam And I think that it's time, you know, it's really a CEO's job to establish the metrics for each department and watch them, you know. And, and in order, so at least you know if you're, if you're firing the marketing department, at least you know that you're doing it for the right reasons, right? You know, I've been on a lot of marketing departments where we got fired because... Well, I haven't been on a lot of market- that's not fair to say. But I've been on a marketing department- or two where we got downsized significantly because, you know, times were bad or, and, and it's just a nice, you know, marketing- is considered to be a nice to have.
Joe Yes, that's exactly right. I think in most adtech companies, and this is kind of a harsh truth, marketing is viewed as a nice to have. And I, I think that we as a discipline, like as B2B marketers, I think honestly there's like a lot of cope in our ecosystem about this because you'll hear marketers say like, "Well, you just need to work with the CEO who really gets it," you know, or something like that.
And I'm like, uh, I hear where you're coming from and like I've been there too, but the thing is, even that CEO who gets it, by which they mean like the CEO is gonna understand, like the way pipeline is generated is like complicated and there are a lot of different touches, you're never gonna be able to track it all, yada, yada. Even if you have a CEO who's kind of aligned with that philosophically, in my experience, it's exactly as you said, Adam. Those CEOs buckle when there's a down quarter.
Adam Hundred percent.
Joe Like they generally believe in marketing, but if they can't put a clear number to it and you don't help them as a marketer tell that story to the board
Adam yeah
Joe It's one down quarter and you're out. So I think therefore, whether you're an agency person like we are, or you're in-house, you're a CMO, you're director of content marketing, whatever your job is, I think you need to be able to tell that story of how you make an economic contribution. You need to challenge yourself to be able to do that. And I think there are basically like two different motions for that. One is if you're the type of organization that sells to thousands of, let's say, agencies, right, in adtech, then it's honestly a bit easier because then you're doing marketing at scale. So it's a little bit more analogous to like a consumer company, where it's like- It is more metric-driven. You're trying to reach these people at scale, so you're gonna push it out through some sort of paid system, right? It could be LinkedIn, Google, et cetera.
And then you can get data not only on how, like, the ads are performing at the bottom of the funnel when you're trying to capture the leads, but also, and this is critical, on everything else, right? So if you're approaching marketing in this data-driven way, and ideally, the numbers people are working with the, like, the words and the creative people to identify what kinds of messages are resonating, and you're actually changing the content you're creating, and, like, the PR campaigns and the messaging on the basis of what's resonating and what's driving pipeline. So that's one way, and we can get into the, like, full funnel thing because I think it's not as simple as just saying, like, growth marketer king. I think it's like everyone needs to work together.
And then it's more complicated and requires more creativity if you're the kind of adtech company that sells to, like, fifty to a hundred publishers or, like, big agencies or brands. Because in that case, you're not doing advertising probably 'cause you're not creating, like, a mousetrap-
Adam Right
Joe where you're reaching people at scale. In that case, it's more about custom content, creativity, figuring out the people who you need to get in front of, and really creating, like, a sales enablement function. And in my experience, as someone who sees how, like, dozens of different adtech companies do this, that is a very tough nut to crack and one that most, like, adtech companies don't have a great system for.
Adam No, they don't. But it's still, you know, I'd still put it on the CEO. That's really a CEO's job, is to hire talent and allocate resources, and they need to look at their individual departments and decide whether it's working or not, not based on a feeling, not based on a sale.
I mean, you know what it's a good analogy? I got a good analogy for you. When the quarterback throws a ball into the end zone, and the receiver catches it, they get all the credit by the fans. Like, "That is amazing that, you know, Peyton Manning threw the ball, and the guy caught it," whatever, right? But there's a lot of blocking that goes into that. There's a lot of play design that goes into it. There's all kinds of, like, elements, and it's the head coach's job to recognize how those guys are being very effective at their job to make that play happen, and that's really what, exactly what a CEO needs to do.
They need to un- not just give credit when the contract is signed, but rather to, like, see all the steps that, that got up there. And here's the thing, we can do that now. That is happening, like, in the last, I don't know, what would you say, five years?
Joe Yeah, but this is part of what I'm saying, is that I agree with you that this is a CEO-level problem. But that doesn't mean the marketer relies on the CEO to figure it out or trusts them to figure it out. I think, like, marketers, like, you know, we need to be our own advocates, and we need to-- We're the masters of our discipline. So you should assume, like, when I'm talking about those marketers who say, "Oh, well, you just need a CEO who gets it," assume your CEO does not get it.
Adam Does not get it.
Joe Even, even if you think they get it, assume they don't get it. And Adam, like, how often do we get hired by a CEO and their understanding of marketing and our contribution really is like, "We want you to get the word out"? And it's like, the thing that I'm challenging marketers, including ourselves, to do is to know your CEO, who is not a marketing expert and that's not their job, they might think that what they want from you as a marketing team is to get the word out. That's not what they want.
Again, when the, like, shit hits the fan and they have a down quarter, you are not gonna be able to say to them, "We're getting the word out." Like, you have to have a more sophisticated data-driven approach. Look, ultimately, as a CEO, I think about this, Adam. Like, when I was in, like, year two of entrepreneurship, uh, like, being a small business owner, I hired a business coach, and they taught me the basics of business and that... 'cause I'd been a freelance writer, and then I had just started this thing, and, like, it got to a decent place 'cause I was, like, good at writing and not because I knew the first thing about running a business.
And so I hired, this was, you know, twenty twenty-two, I hired a business coach, and they taught me, you know, the basics, and they were like, "Okay, look, at a high level, your business is just marketing plus sales plus delivery." Marketing brings in the opportunities, sales converts the opportunities into revenue, and delivery maintains and ideally grows the revenue through providing an excellent service.
Adam Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm.
Joe And so I think marketers almost need to go back to that, like, business 101 framework because it's like, I guarantee you what the CEO wants in the end is not for marketing to get the word out. What they want is for marketing to generate opportunities. So you need to connect those dots for them from getting the word out to driving the opportunities.
Adam Mm-hmm.
Joe And here's the interesting thing is that I think there are some ways for sort of qualitative-minded marketers to just go do that directly. The number one way I would suggest in adtech is what I mentioned about sales enablement. I think you should think about if your organization, as is true of many adtech companies, said that events are their most effective channel, what they're really saying is events are a measurable, quote-unquote, marketing channel because we can send the sales team, they'll talk to twenty prospects, and then eventually we'll close three of them- and then we can prove that we had an impact on sales.
Adam Mm-hmm.
Joe So by the same token, just as you can send salespeople to that event, you can get in front of those prospects before and after the event. And to me, that is a great role for marketing in a sort of, like, enterprise sales-driven organization is figure out who those twenty people are, create content for them, both in the sense that you directly create content for them and then you get it in front of them, whether that means commenting on their social posts or sending them email or whatever, and in the sense that you just have them in mind, right? Like you, like, when I write my content for my marketing agency, I think of, like, the adtech CEO or the adtech VP of marketing, right? And so as marketers, we need to have that, whoever the sales team is selling to in our, in our heads, and I think that's helpful.
The other way, and this is something I think we fuck up all the time, is You might need to get someone on board, and this is especially relevant if you're a marketing leader and you have to build a team, whose skill set is this stuff. Like, we sometimes expect, like, a content marketer, whose skill set is really that they're a writer and then they learn some marketing stuff, to do all the analytics and, like, analyze what's working and then point themselves in the right direction.
I would advise any content marketer to, like, go to AI and try to learn how to do that and whatever, but it is also tremendously helpful. If I were building even a four-person marketing team at an adtech company, I would want one of those people to be a growth marketer, 'cause I would want a person whose entire job is, like, look at everything we're doing and give me signals as to what's working and how we can improve, and even that is a good way you can tell a story to help the CEO understand how marketing is driving value.
Adam We're in sort of a funny, like, generational transition period when it comes down to marketing, right? Because you've got everyone over the age of, let's say, 35 who's working in marketing is, is used to this old way of not really measuring their efforts, right? And then you've got a younger group. Now, it's, I think that there's a culture of fear when it comes down to marketers' relationships with CROs and CEOs-
Joe Mm-hmm ...
Adam Because, like, asking for, you know, more money or anything, it just is, is not met very well. But you're 100% right is that this is really about managing up, right? This is about knowing what your CEO wants and also, as you said, like, translating even when they don't express what they want to something that makes sense for them to invest in. So you have to understand their, their needs and then say, "Look, we're... This is gonna help, and if it doesn't, it's on me, fire me." You know? Like, but if you don't put yourself on the line like that, you're gonna get fired anyway.
Joe Amen, brother. Yeah, I think that's such a great point because I think as marketers, and this is really true of all people in all things, right? This is a way in which business really teaches you about people, is, like, we're afraid to ask, right? Like, we're afraid to ask, like, or to set clear expectations with our, our CEO of, like, "Here's what I think we can achieve and what we're achieving. Here's our baseline, and here's where I think we can go, and if you give me, like, more money, here's what I'll be able to achieve," and so on.
We're afraid to set these targets, but here's the thing. You shouldn't be afraid to set the targets because exactly what you just said is right. I guarantee you, if you don't set the targets-
Adam You're done
Joe And it's all wishy-washy, if you're getting the word out, there's a timer. You're screwed eventually. So it's like you have to arrive at a numbers-driven understanding of what's working today and where you can go and what contribution you can make to the business, because if you cannot, they will cut it when there's a down quarter.
Adam Um- Of course. I can sp- I, I have first-person experience with this, you know, watching teams get shrunk because the revenue is, is, uh... and it, we're the first ones to get cut. This is the only way to fight back. Prove your worth.
Joe And then there's another thing you said that I really liked, which is, um, you talked about asking for more money and being afraid to do that. I think this is actually a great heuristic for marketers.
If you can't go to your client, if you're an agency, or you can't go to your boss, if you're in the marketing department, or your CEO and ask for more money, you're probably in trouble.
Because if you are making an economic contribution to the business and, like, you have a data-driven understanding of your value, you should be, even if you don't wanna ask for it right now or it's not the right time or you started two months ago or whatever, you should be developing an understanding of, like, with these resources and this scope of activities, here's the contribution we're making, and it should inevitably be true that if you had more resources, you could scale it up.
Now, again, that's a timeline thing, because if you're two months in, like, you gotta see how it plays out at a certain level, and then eventually you scale it. But I think that is a great way to get real with yourself about whether you're making a sufficient contribution, is to say, like, it's not just like, "Are we safe today?" But it's like, "Okay, if we're really delivering, you know, could we ask for, to double the retainer and double the, the contribution?" If you are actually delivering and you can prove that, it's not that it should automatically be granted, but it should be on the table. It shouldn't be like- oh, that's a crazy ask with no context.
And so, yeah, I would encourage every marketer, whether you're a consultant, agency, or you're, you're in-house, to be thinking along those lines. Like, what would need to be true for me not only to prove my impact today, but to, to show the CEO that extra contributions are gonna have a bigger impact?
Adam It can require a lot of evangelism, though. It's, it's, I mean, I'm not suggesting what you're saying isn't right. It's more that, like, it makes it sound easy and simple, right? And it's not.
Joe No, it's not. You know? Um- I totally agree. Yeah ...
Adam It's, uh, you know, I mean, mediocre salespeople keep their jobs, right? Why? Because you can always justify their existence because they pay for themselves. That's how they're perceived at least, right? But mediocre marketers aren't gonna keep their jobs, right? So you must y- you really come quite prepared, and especially at a sales-driven organization, to demonstrate it because, you know, as we said, like, you know, I can fill the pipeline, but if sales aren't happening, then marketing will point to sales, sales will point to marketing, you know, and, and it, and it becomes like a, a blame game like that as well. But I think that there are better tools, as I, I said before, available to marketers now to prove their worth, and a- as you said, if you don't have a growth person on your team right now, your days are numbered.
Joe Yeah, because I think the... Like, we've gotten into growth marketing recently, and now it's a lens that not only am I applying on a few of our accounts where we're explicitly doing growth activities like Google Ads or SEO, what I'm not most excited about that. I think, like, adding Google or LinkedIn ads is, like, fine, right? It's like- Okay ... yeah, you have a new thing. You can sell a new service you perform. If you're, uh, in-house, you know, you're, you're adding a channel. But what is exciting is not that. It's applying the sort of epistemology of growth- To the entire marketing program.
So it's looking at everything you're doing, including like organic LinkedIn or blog posts or PR, and like quantifying the impact, understanding what's working, and doubling down on it. And I think if you do that, that's really the holy grail for full funnel marketing, because I'm not saying just shift your focus to measurable tactics, right? That's a charge that's often levied at the like, you should record the data and make a concrete contribution people. They say, "Oh, well, then you're just gonna optimize for whatever's, you know, clearly or most easily measurable." True, that can happen.
But if you're doing it right, it's not about growth marketing at the expense of like comms or content marketing. It's about taking a data-driven approach to the whole thing, and then these things feed each other. Because if you know what's working in LinkedIn ads, like if you know what reports people are clicking on, guess what? Those are probably the reports that are interesting in general, and then the other content you create and the comms campaigns you're running can be informed by that.
Adam I'm actually working on a graphic. I've been-- I'm, I, I don't like it enough yet to send it to you, but it shows how these things all like feed into each other. It's basically like a flywheel that shows how, you know, the social and the content, everything all kind of feeds into each other. That's the best part about this company, I think, is that it's putting its neck on the line. And as we said before, you know what? I'd rather be killed quickly than killed slowly, right? And if we're gonna like take on clients, you know, it's refreshing to hear us say like, "We wanna be held accountable," number one, and number two, to then be held accountable. Like, that's what we're going for, and if it doesn't work out, then it doesn't work out.
You know, we'll, we'll find some other clients that we'll, you know, that it'll work with for whatever reasons, you know. But this is what I like about it, and, and it's working. That's the, the best part. Yeah. As I, as I said to a client the other day. I said to a client on a call the other day, I said, "We are the beneficiaries of Joe's impatience." He will not- We will not like wait for a reporter to write about something. It's just like Joe's impatience like, "Well, why can't we publish? What-- Let's push it out. Let's-- We have all these things at our, at our disposal." And that's, that's really how I see the culture at the company is like, is like it's driven by this like, "No, that's not good enough, and we're not gonna put, put our control in somebody else's hands," you know?
Joe Yeah, yeah. Man-maniacal urgency. It is about impatience, and it is about like marketers having a higher standard for themselves than-
Adam Yeah ...
Joe Not than even than others do, but than others know how to articulate, right? And that's what I just wanna end on is like CEOs will not, whether you're a VP of marketing or content marketing manager or an agency person, CEOs will not tell you how to deliver for them. They just don't know, because they don't understand B2B marketing. Like it's a very poorly understood thing that a lot of marketers themselves aren't good at explaining.
And so let me give you an example of like the full funnel data-driven marketing approach you were talking about. Like I was speaking to a CEO, uh, we worked with the other day, and I was talking about how I was reviewing a full funnel marketing proposal that our growth marketer had put together.
And I said to him, "I'm really excited about this and our, what we're collaborating on, precisely because it's not about just adding LinkedIn or Google Ads to our like comms and content marketing program. It is about taking a data-driven approach to the entire thing and figuring out how to improve every part of it to make marketing a clear contributor to revenue and to the growth of this company." And as with most adtech companies that are successful, this company had already grown a lot, but I guarantee you they attributed ninety to a hundred percent of their growth to sales. And then they're like, "Well, marketing, you know, we, we allocate a couple hundred grand a year to it. We don't really know if it works. It's reasonable to assign one percent of our revenue to marketing," right? And I'm like, "What the F?" Like, that is not a satisfactory state of affairs.
Like, we should not be like, "Hey, client CEO whose company is crushing it. Allocate one percent of your revenue to us, and you'll never know if it works, but maybe you'll keep us around while you're doing well." And the reality is, that is the case for so many adtech marketing programs.
And I've, I've spoken to CEOs of billion-dollar companies in this industry where they have like thirty marketing people working for them, and they're just kinda like, "Yeah, marketing, ugh. Like, you know, I, I don't know if that shit works, but at some point I decided I should have it, and then I just, I kept it to like such a small number relative to our size that I don't really care if it works or not. And it's just like, you know, a bet that's hard to prove." We shouldn't be satisfied with that. Like whether you're in-house or at an agency, it's like you need to challenge yourself and challenge the CEO to see marketing as a substantial contributor to the growth of the company.
And if it's not, your days are numbered, so only the paranoid survive.
Adam You know, someone once said to me that they think every marketer should have experience carrying a bag, as they refer to it, right? Sales, right?
Joe Mm-hmm.
Adam And you could say it the other way too.You could say it the other way, because now more than ever, those two departments should be in lockstep, and they haven't been- Yeah ... in the past. It's been like the CMO can sometimes be like a bit of a dilettante who like will, you know, just kind of create pretty media kits and things like that. I mean, I remember working at a company where the media kits came in June, because they spent so much time. We've already sold it. We've sold eighty percent of our stuff at the first half of the year. We didn't even have the media kit yet, because we don't use it, and we don't care about it, and they were so slow with it. It's now with w- everything we're talking about is all about how these two teams should be much more on each other's side and not pointing each other fingers at each and not taking credit from each other either. It just should be one thing, and connecting those two things is kinda what we're doing.
Joe Totally agree. And you know, I think I've seen the benefits of this as we've been talking to CEOs about it, which again, like this is a benefit we have being an agency is like we get to talk to twenty different CEOs about these issues. And so we get to see how a lot of different leaders who sign the checks for marketing think about this stuff, and they respect this. It's what you said, Adam. It's like you're gonna get your head chopped off if you don't do this, so lean into the pain, lean into the risk and the pressure, and say to the CEO, like, "I wanna make a contribution to this business, and here are my hypotheses. Like, let's work through that together.
You know, let's analyze what's working, get the data, and, and iterate." But if you don't have a feasible plan to make an economic contribution, and I think that the reality is many marketers and most marketing agencies don't, you know, you're never going to achieve your potential. And as you said, I am impatient about that and will not rest until we do.
Adam I would just like to say the metaphor is more lean into... You're g- if you're gonna get your head cut off, lean into the guillotine and dare them to pull the lever. Dare them.
Joe I love it, man. Well, thank you very much. I appreciate the conversation. I hope people find this valuable. And hey, if you're listening and you've already cracked this, just send me an email, 'cause I'd love a shortcut.
Adam Absolutely.
Joe All right.
Adam All right, Joe. Thanks, buddy.
Joe Thanks, Adam. See you soon.
Adam Talk to you. Bye-bye.
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