The most interesting conversations I’ve had lately aren’t about tools. They’re about trust.
Trust in the numbers. Trust in what’s actually driving growth. Trust that the decisions being made will hold up when someone asks, “Why did this work?"
This week at the FCS RFK Marketing Summit, our team’s been listening in on what senior marketers and operators are actually wrestling with. It keeps coming back to attribution and measurement. Most teams can report activity. Fewer can report it in a way leadership will bet on.
So we went to the source. With KNow Research, we interviewed 10 senior financial services leaders across marketing, finance, and data to answer one question: What does measurement look like when it actually changes decisions and holds up under scrutiny?
If growth feels harder to explain than it used to, you’re not imagining it.
Here’s what I’m paying attention to this week.
Patrick Patterson
CEO at Level Agency
Podcast spotlight
Advertising That Feels Like Value, Not Noise
With Lonn Shulkin (President, BAM Strategy)
If your leadership style is “talk first, fix later,” this one will sting a little.
On this episode of Good Enough Isn’t, I sat down with Lonn Shulkin. We skip the agency clichés and get into the leadership habits that actually keep clients and talent around.
It’s a practical conversation about trust, ownership, and the quiet ways ego shows up in meetings, decisions, and growth.
What we cover:
The “speak last” move that instantly changes meeting dynamics
Why retention is the most honest metric in the room
How ego quietly kills ownership (and how to spot it in yourself)
What marketing that feels like value looks like in practice
AI Search Is Turning Discovery Into Checkout Google adding buy buttons directly into Gemini and AI search isn’t a feature update. It’s a power move. Discovery, consideration, and transaction are starting to live in the same interface, owned by the platform. For leaders, the immediate question isn’t attribution theory. It’s who controls demand when the funnel collapses. Read more
Incrementality Testing Is Having Its Moment, and That’s Risky Incrementality is suddenly everywhere, which usually means it’s about to be misused. This piece does a good job calling out where tests go wrong and why false confidence is worse than no signal at all. If leadership trust matters, this is worth your time. Read more
Scaling Content Reach Is Now an Ops Problem AI has made content cheap. Distribution is the constraint. This HubSpot breakdown reinforces a simple truth: without clear ownership, repurposing plans, and channel discipline, more content just creates more noise. Read more
Why CreativeOps and MOps Are Finally Merging When content velocity increases, fragmented teams slow everything down. This article makes the case that separating creative ops and marketing ops leads to duplication, weak feedback loops, and diluted outcomes. One engine beats three silos. Read more
YouTube Quietly Changes How Content Gets Found Search filters and terminology updates don’t sound dramatic, but they shape discovery. YouTube’s changes affect how users browse and refine results, which can shift reach without warning. Worth flagging if video is part of your mix. Read more
AI Guardrails Are Becoming Table Stakes AWS’s work on detecting and redacting PII with Bedrock highlights a growing reality. As AI workflows scale, privacy and data handling can’t be an afterthought. Guardrails are now part of the build, not the cleanup. Read more
Deep dive: AI
First-party data is becoming the advantage layer
Digiday’s look at the scramble for first-party data captures a shift many teams feel. As AI systems increasingly mediate discovery, personalization, and commerce, clean and trusted data becomes leverage.
Brands with strong first-party foundations can connect identity, behavior, and outcomes across channels with less guesswork. They can adopt new AI workflows faster because the inputs are usable, consistent, and governed. Brands without that foundation stay dependent on fragmented platform reporting and opaque signals.
The practical move is simple: tighten collection, consent, governance, and integration. Make the data accessible to the people and tools that need it. AI amplifies whatever foundation you give it.
Measurement in 2026 is about confidence, not perfection
MarTech’s look at improving marketing measurement in 2026 points to a reset that’s already happening. As privacy limits expand and platforms automate more of the funnel, teams are moving away from fragile, over-engineered attribution models.
The teams making progress rely on reinforcing signals. Incrementality testing where it matters most. Directional attribution for day-to-day steering. Business-level metrics that leadership trusts. No single model carries the truth, but aligned signals create confidence.
Measurement is also speeding up. Instead of quarterly explanations, it’s becoming part of the weekly operating rhythm. Faster feedback makes growth decisions easier to defend and easier to adjust.
Baryons Baryons is a voice-first AI mentor designed to help leaders think, reflect, and improve through conversation, not dashboards. It combines memory, intention, and post-conversation insight to support real behavior change.
I like it because it treats AI as a thinking partner, not just a productivity shortcut. For founders and operators, that distinction matters.
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