Marketers Turn To Business Data To Ground Media Strategies As Buyer Journeys Fragment

Marketing leaders have spent years circling the shadows around their data. Dark social, the part of the customer journey that lives in Slack threads, private messages, and offhand conversations, is often where real influence happens. Attribution tools can’t see it, yet many brands still rely on measurement systems built for a tidy, linear path that vanished long ago. The result is a quiet crisis of confidence as teams second-guess their dashboards and search for a way to measure what actually moves the business.

Glenn Barnard, the Associate Vice President of Strategic Planning and Measurement at Harmelin Media, has built his reputation on helping brands find their footing in the messy world of attribution. His perspective offers a grounded, unvarnished look at what actually works, opening the door to a much more honest conversation about how performance should be measured today.

"Without attribution, you're flying blind," Barnard says. The first step toward clarity, he explains, is acknowledging the old models are obsolete. "The old marketing funnel doesn't really apply anymore."

• Funnel no more: The emerging alternative is a messy, cyclical model like the loyalty loop or customer carousel, where buyers drift in and out of awareness instead of progressing neatly from point A to point B. "People come into awareness, slip out, come back again, then finally start considering the product before drifting back to awareness once more," Barnard explains.

In a world where attention resets constantly, he says marketers must move past early digital click tools and focus on real business outcomes. No tool is a holy grail, but media mix modeling moves the needle by accounting for external forces that last click systems ignore. That business-first philosophy is the foundation of Harmelin's methodology.

• Follow the money: "You could have all the data in the world and it could still not help you do your job unless you’re looking at it correctly," says Barnard. For him, the fix starts with the business itself. "We look at the business data and plot that geographically to find where sales are good and where they’re bad. Then we mix that with other data from the census or from Snowflake." Insight comes from following the money, not the marketing metrics.

• Dollars with sense: Once the strategy is set, Barnard’s team shifts to a ground-up, zero-based budgeting process that builds the media plan directly from the business goals. "We start at the ground and say, if you want to reach this many people with these four channels, this is how much spend it’s going to take," he explains. From there, they evaluate how each channel contributes to reach and awareness, keeping the plan anchored to the markets that matter most.

• Sharpest tool in the stack: A business first strategy doesn’t mean throwing out every tool. Barnard notes that his tactical teams still use platform-native data for day-to-day optimization. "From an activation perspective, our teams on search, social, and programmatic rely on the platforms' own attribution systems," he says. "If Meta shows what's working to drive a web conversion, then great. That’s what we’ll do."

Ultimately, Barnard recommends leaders re-evaluate the industry's reliance on last-click attribution for a future-proof strategy. He urges them to abandon the obsession with incidental marketing metrics and concentrate on the one that truly matters: business growth. "Forget about your last-click attribution. It's probably telling you the wrong thing," he states.

• Vanity vs. value: “Who cares how many clicks a display ad drove? That’s not the purpose of a display ad," Barnard continues. "I can't tell you how many people look at bounce rate as a metric of performance. Just stop."

In Barnard’s view, winning today depends on a culture that treats testing as a discipline rather than a slogan. Being data-driven, he says, has far less to do with dashboards and far more to do with "understanding what’s happening in-store and understanding all of the available information and data that we have at our fingertips." The companies that pull ahead will be the ones willing to test often, tolerate failure, and accept that success rarely moves in a straight line.