Kevin Wassong, founder and CEO of mktg.ai, built creative technology for Merrill Lynch, De Beers, and Sotheby’s before spending the last two years building the tool he says the industry has never had: a Bloomberg terminal for marketing.
Nearly a thousand direct-to-consumer brands launch every year as pure performance marketing plays. By the end of that same year, Kevin Wassong estimates 995 of them are gone. That’s not a rounding error — that’s the entire business model failing at a 99.5% clip, and it’s failing for a specific, avoidable reason: brand and performance marketing have been treated as two separate disciplines for thirty years, run by different teams, measured by different scorecards, and almost never talking to each other.
Wassong has the resume to make that call. He built digital@JWT in the mid-90s, launched Sotheby’s first online auction platform, helped bring Fox Business Network to air, and picked up an Emmy along the way. Now he runs mktg.ai, a platform built to do something he says doesn’t exist anywhere else in the industry — give a CMO a real-time view of everything happening across their marketing, the way a financial advisor sees a portfolio.
Why did brand and performance marketing split in the first place?
Wassong traces the divide back to the moment media and creative got organizationally separated — a split he fought against in his own career until he was told directly by WPP’s Martin Sorrell to hand his media responsibilities to MindShare. He left two years later. In his view, that separation set off a chain reaction: performance marketing became obsessed with impressions, and when brands ran out of impressions to buy, the industry manufactured more — which is a direct line to today’s ad fraud and made-for-advertising inventory problem.
“Our industry became obsessed with impressions… And so in performance marketing, it became about chasing impressions, chasing the clicks. And by the way, I think that’s led to a lot of what I call the disposable brand.”
— Kevin Wassong, Founder & CEO, mktg.ai
He calls out Allbirds specifically as the cautionary tale — a performance-marketing rocket ship that, in his words, ended up pivoting toward being “a data warehouse versus a shoe maker.” Compare that to brands like Bare Necessities or Poppi, which started as performance plays but had founders who were, as Wassong put it, “very cognizant of managing all of the pieces that come together to form the experience” — the difference between a brand with longevity and one that’s disposable.
The organizational dysfunction runs deeper than most marketers realize. Wassong told a story about a global agency handling a brand’s organic social — when he asked what happens when a piece of organic content starts gaining real velocity, whether it gets handed to the paid team to amplify, the answer was no. Paid and organic were run as competitors inside the same holding company, not as one team.
“We got a call from them and they said, ‘Hey, we’d like to meet with you.’ …We do all of their organic. I said, ‘What do you do when you have a piece of organic content that’s hitting a nerve — how do you share that with the rest of the marketing ecosystem?’ And the answer was, ‘We don’t.'”
— Kevin Wassong, Founder & CEO, mktg.ai
How much does creative actually drive performance?
This is the part that should make every performance marketer rethink their budget. Wassong cited research showing creative accounts for anywhere from 70% to 86% of the impact marketing has on consumers — not the platform, not the targeting, the creative itself.
“You’re finding research today is coming out from a lot of different groups out there that creative accounts for more than 70%, I’ve seen up to 86%, of the impact that your marketing has on the consumers. It’s as simple as that.”
— Kevin Wassong, Founder & CEO, mktg.ai
And it’s not just digital. Wassong pointed out that hundreds of brands spend less than 70% of their budget on digital channels at all — the rest goes to retail environments, out-of-home, and events. Mastercard, he noted, barely runs traditional brand advertising anymore and instead pours resources into sponsorships and experiences that connect directly with its community. That’s a strategic bet that creative resonance, wherever it shows up, is what compounds into a brand relationship — not a one-off click.
Can meaning actually be measured beyond conversions?
Here’s where Wassong said something most marketing tech vendors won’t say out loud.
“Attribution is an unsolvable problem. It can never be solved in our industry. If you think that you can solve attribution, you’re chasing a ghost.”
— Kevin Wassong, Founder & CEO, mktg.ai
He’s not saying platform-level attribution is worthless — Meta, Google, and The Trade Desk can absolutely quantify what happens inside their own walls. What can’t be solved is stitching that into a single source of truth across the entire marketing ecosystem. Even media mix modeling, which plenty of CMOs lean on as the answer, gets the same verdict from the finance side.
“I’ve talked to some of the largest global CMOs, financial services companies, others who are like, ‘It’s directional at best. It gives me an idea, but it’s not going to give me the answer.'”
— Kevin Wassong, Founder & CEO, mktg.ai
His alternative isn’t to give up on measurement — it’s to test holistically. Pull a channel like out-of-home out of a campaign entirely, watch what happens to the bottom line, then reintroduce it and measure the delta. That’s slower and less satisfying than a dashboard number, but it’s honest about what attribution can and can’t tell you.
The bigger picture
The line that stuck with me most: Wassong asks people to name the last product they bought online, and 90% of the time they can remember the product but not the brand. That’s the real cost of the brand-performance split — you can win the click and still lose the relationship. On this show, we talk constantly about the same failure mode from the data side: mistargeted campaigns, broken attribution, trust eroded one bad send at a time. Wassong’s version of the same problem is organizational — paid and organic teams that don’t talk, agencies incentivized to hit platform KPIs instead of building anything durable, and CMOs flying without the equivalent of a Bloomberg terminal for their own spend.
His closing point is the one worth sitting with: stop reinventing the wheel with every new brand launch, and start building something evolutionary instead of disposable. That applies whether you’re B2B or B2C. Creative is the performance driver. Brand is what makes the performance last.
Connect with Kevin Wassong on LinkedIn or visit mktg.ai to learn more.
This article was adapted from an episode of Deconstructing Data, BDEX’s weekly podcast on data-driven marketing. Tune in live every Thursday at 4:15 PM Eastern on LinkedIn.
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