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Jeff Greenfield doesn’t just work in adtech — he’s lived long enough to watch the industry make the same mistakes twice, but with better graphics and worse excuses.

When I introduced him as “the Cookie Monster of adtech,” he didn’t blink. “Well, cookies are still there,” he said. “They keep saying they’re going to go away.” Then came the half-smile of a man who’s been through this rodeo since pixels came in .gif form. “But the industry’s finally waking up to the concept of better measurement.”

Better measurement — the phrase everyone uses when they mean we have no idea what’s happening, but it looks expensive.

What Greenfield really meant is that marketers have turned “data-driven” from a strategy into a diagnosis. They’re worshiping dashboards the way medieval peasants worshiped relics — hoping that one more spreadsheet will save their souls. “Most marketers today are very data driven,” he said. “They’ve been indoctrinated into this GA4, last-click type of mentality.”

Indoctrinated. Not educated — indoctrinated. The word hits like a slap. These are professionals who can recite their CTRs from memory but couldn’t tell you why they’re spending 80% of their budget on retargeting people who already bought the thing.

And as Greenfield put it, “They’re following the numbers that Google wants them to follow.” Which is corporate-speak for you’re playing poker against the house, and the dealer’s your account rep.

There’s an entire religion built around the gospel of last-click attribution. The priests wear Patagonia vests, the hymns are written in Excel macros, and the sermons are preached from dashboards.

Greenfield doesn’t just reject the faith — he’s the heretic nailing a spreadsheet to the church door. “The truth is that the numbers they’re given are wrong,” he said. Then came his heresy: “Now, is our measurement better? I like to say it’s less wrong. It’s definitely a lot less wrong.”

Less wrong. That’s it. That’s the state of the art. Forget accuracy — we’re in the Era of Acceptable Error.

Marketers aren’t chasing truth; they’re chasing confirmation bias that matches the PowerPoint. And they’re doing it with conviction.

Greenfield’s philosophy is refreshingly bleak: you’re not right, you’re just less delusional than yesterday.

Every prophet needs a parable, and Greenfield’s comes with a garden hose.

You’re selling a “leak-free hose.” You buy Meta ads to build awareness, Google ads for conversion. Someone scrolls past your video on Facebook — nothing. Two days later, they see it again on Instagram, think, not bad, and move on.

Two weeks later, their hose bursts mid-gardening. They grab their phone, type your brand name into Google, and buy.

Google gets all the credit. Meta gets none.

Your dashboard declares victory for search, and you slash your awareness budget. Then, weeks later, sales quietly start to tank. You’ve just optimized your business into a slow-motion collapse.

“Multiply that a few thousand times,” Greenfield said, “and if you follow the numbers, what are you going to do? You’re going to cut your spend on Meta.”

This is how modern marketing works: a global industry gaslighting itself with attribution reports.

Greenfield calls it the “invisible ripple effect.” The unseen awareness, the half-remembered ad that nudged a future buyer — all of it erased by the tyranny of last-click. “It’s kind of like God,” he said. “You can’t see God, but the effects are there.”

Except unlike faith, marketers demand proof — even when the proof is wrong.

There was a time when marketers trusted instinct, story, and emotion. Then someone stood on a stage and said, “Data is the new oil,” and everyone grabbed a shovel.

“Direct marketers always understood the value of data,” Greenfield said. “But in adtech, we got too entrenched in the idea that more is better.”

He told me about a weight-loss company that bought Mastercard data to find people who’d just quit competing diets — the ultimate “precision targeting.” “Each layer of targeting increased our cost fourfold,” he said. “Yes, we acquired customers. But most never became profitable.”

That’s the punchline: the more precisely you target, the more precisely you fail.

Every extra data layer narrows the audience, inflates the cost, and strangles creativity. “We’ve shifted from the upper funnel toward the lower,” Greenfield said. “We’ve decreased reach overall — and decreased effectiveness.”

So there it is: the equation of modern advertising. Smarter targeting, dumber results.

The industry built an obsession machine — one that mistakes granularity for intelligence. And now it’s stuck, slowly drowning in the quicksand of its own dashboards.

At one point, I asked, half-seriously, when attribution would finally grow up — stop acting like the teenager who steals beer from the fridge and blames the dog. Greenfield laughed. “I think we’re getting there,” he said, which is the kind of optimism only someone who’s lived through GA4 migration hell could muster.

In 2008, nobody even knew what attribution meant. Now, every intern uses it to justify a meeting invite. Then Apple dropped its iOS privacy grenade, and Google forced everyone to manually update their code for GA4 — the first time in history marketers had to touch the plumbing. Suddenly, everyone who thought measurement was “set it and forget it” found themselves elbows-deep in JSON.

For the first time, brands had to actually think about measurement. And in that pain, something resembling maturity emerged.

“All models are wrong,” Greenfield said, “but some are useful.”

That line should be engraved on the wall of every marketing conference room. All models are wrong — but some will lose you less money.

Measurement isn’t about being right. It’s about being less wrong, faster. And in an industry addicted to shiny objects and false certainty, that’s as close to enlightenment as we’re going to get.

Because in the end, attribution isn’t truth — it’s interpretation. And the only thing more dangerous than a bad model is a marketer who believes it’s gospel.

Jeff Greenfield’s career reads like an existential riddle written by a talent agent. Magician. Chiropractor. Pilot. Marketer. Somewhere in there, he also managed to invent a new kind of measurement company while quietly laughing at the industry’s addiction to meaningless metrics. It shouldn’t make sense — and yet it does. Because all those roles, he insists, are about the same thing: how humans perceive reality, and how easily they’re persuaded to see what they want.

“I think all kids get interested in magic,” he told me, “I just never lost the bug for it.” Most people stop when they learn the trick deck doesn’t make them cool. Jeff didn’t. He turned it into rent money and eventually a career. During graduate school in Los Angeles, while studying to be a chiropractor, he paid his tuition by performing close-up illusions at restaurants and clubs. Eventually, he earned a place at the Magic Castle in Hollywood, a mecca for magicians and skeptics alike. There, he learned how to make a coin vanish not by moving faster, but by making the audience look in the wrong place.

It’s the same skill that drives every great ad campaign. When you understand what someone is paying attention to — and more importantly, what they’re ignoring — you can sell them anything.

He never stopped using that magician’s mindset. “People don’t actually want the truth,” he said. “They want the story that feels true.”

And in that one line, you can hear the entire gospel of modern marketing.

Magic is just controlled psychology dressed up as entertainment. The trick isn’t in the movement — it’s in the attention gap. Humans only focus on one thing at a time, which makes them gloriously easy to mislead. Greenfield learned early that if you can control what people notice, you can control what they believe.

That’s not so different from advertising, where brands spend millions manipulating perception, hoping the illusion lasts long enough for someone to hit “Add to Cart.”

“Most marketers think their job is to buy clicks that lead to sales,” Jeff said. “But what they’re really doing is buying attention — and hoping it turns into sales.” The tragedy is that somewhere along the way, marketing forgot this was theater. It became accounting. Creativity was replaced by dashboards. The magician’s flourish gave way to the spreadsheet.

Magicians are at least honest about the con — they tell you they’re going to fool you. Marketers, on the other hand, call it “data science” and sell it as truth.

“I think what most marketers forget is that marketing is supposed to be a show,” Jeff said. And he’s right. Ad creatives used to have flair, rhythm, timing — that sense of spectacle that made you feel something before you even processed what you were seeing. Today, campaigns are optimized to death before they’ve even lived.

Greenfield’s own story illustrates the difference. In 2006, he helped create a branded entertainment campaign called Hottest Mom in America. Yes, that was the real title. It sounds like a late-night reality show — because it was. But it was also one of the most effective awareness campaigns of its time.

The show was commissioned by a pharmaceutical company competing against Allergan — the makers of Botox — to promote their new cosmetic filler. They had a problem: Allergan could outspend them 100 to 1, and they needed something bold enough to hijack the national conversation.

So Greenfield built a faux reality show, complete with auditions across the country, a format that mirrored American Idol, and enough media buzz to keep analysts and reporters glued to the story. Thousands of moms showed up at dawn to audition. The result? The company’s market cap jumped by half a billion dollars.

It worked because it wasn’t selling features — it was selling fantasy. It was performance art wrapped in commerce. The brand didn’t interrupt culture; it became culture.

That’s what Greenfield means by showmanship: make people feel before you make them think

Ask Jeff what’s wrong with advertising today, and he’ll tell you flatly: no one remembers an ad that only targets their wallet.

When ads only speak in metrics, the brain forgets them. Emotion builds memory; data builds boredom. “Most ads today are all about benefits and prices,” he said. “They’re not about who we are as a brand.”

He misses the days when commercials could move you — when 30 seconds of television could make you tear up or laugh uncontrollably. The kind of storytelling that lived rent-free in your mind for years. That’s what performance marketing killed: the long-term emotional echo.

He’s not saying awareness replaces performance. He’s saying emotion is the performance. People don’t buy because of perfect attribution; they buy because they’ve been moved.

Magic taught Jeff something the ad industry forgot: you can’t quantify wonder. You can track clicks, conversions, and impressions, but not the split second when a person feels awe.

That’s what advertising used to chase — that moment of emotional surprise, that tiny spark that says this brand understands me. It’s the oldest illusion in the world, and still the most powerful.

“Magic gives people an adjustment,” he said, looping back to his chiropractic past. “It changes their perspective.”

Maybe that’s what marketers need most — not another dashboard, not another attribution model, but an adjustment. A reminder that persuasion isn’t about data. It’s about delight.

The free feed gives you headlines. The paid one gives you x-rays of the industry’s brain.

This week’s deep dive — “How the Cult of Data Devoured Creativity” — rips the mask off marketing’s greatest addiction: our worship of numbers that mean nothing.

Inside ADOTAT+, we break what no one else will say out loud:
• Why “data-driven” is just code for “fear-driven.”
• How bad KPIs became the corporate version of comfort food.
• Why Orlando Wood’s Lemon wasn’t a warning — it was an obituary.
• The real economics of over-targeting (hint: it’s a bonfire of your budget).

If you’re still measuring click-throughs like it’s 2015, you’re the product.