Let’s make one thing clear: Bradley Keefer thinks ROAS is not your friend. It’s the clingy ex of marketing metrics—looks decent on paper, made you feel important once, and now just texts you at 2AM with a false sense of success.

And Bradley Keefer? He wants it gone.

As Chief Revenue Officer at KeenDS, Keefer oversees $7.5 billion in marketing budgets and has zero patience left for what he calls “performance cosplay.” In his view, most marketers have become delusional number jockeys, building beautiful dashboards that CFOs couldn’t care less about. “Marketers love ROAS,” he says, with the weariness of someone who’s sat through one too many KPI reviews. “And now there’s iROAS and incremental ROAS—more shiny acronyms. But CFOs are asking: how is this actually driving shareholder value?”

Spoiler: it’s not. At least not according to him.

Here’s the scene Keefer paints: You walk into a boardroom where CMOs are practically clutching their ROAS charts like the lost ark. They point to a slight uptick in engagement and declare victory. Meanwhile, the CFO sits there, silently calculating how many heads will roll in next quarter’s budget cut. It’s marketing theatre. Everyone claps, nobody believes the plot.

According to Keefer, these metrics have become cover stories—tools for job preservation, not brand growth. “People are scared. Marketing is the first line item to get cut, and CMOs have the shortest tenure in the C-suite. So they chase whatever metric makes them look valuable. Even if it doesn’t move the needle.”

The result? A culture of overreporting, underperforming, and slowly bleeding brand equity.

Keefer doesn’t mince words. If you’re optimizing for ROAS, you’re not marketing—you’re rationalizing. The metric, he argues, is like giving yourself a high-five for selling snow to Eskimos, then acting surprised when the glaciers melt. “Marketing should be thought of as an investment through time,” he says. “Which means the only metric that matters is net present value. That’s your long-term, compounding impact. That’s your real growth.”

He’s not alone in this thinking, but he might be the only one shouting it in a room full of performance marketers with dollar-sign pupils and six-tab spreadsheets.

His example? A beauty subscription brand. On paper, they looked great: top-line revenue going up, performance metrics through the roof. But beneath that thin veneer of digital optimism? Collapse. “They weren’t building a brand. They were just spending. Their customer base was eroding, and when we ran the models, the stalling wasn’t tied to anything other than the fact that they’d ignored the fundamentals.”

The lesson, according to Keefer, is brutal and obvious: “If you're not investing in the top of the funnel, you’re just renting growth. Eventually, it stops.”

According to Keefer, part of the industry’s dysfunction is structural. CMOs walk into jobs with targets on their backs. “They have one year to prove the last guy sucked and one year to pretend they’re a genius,” he says. “By year three, it’s obvious they’re just repeating the same playbook—and they’re out.”

It’s a vicious cycle, he argues, and it's incentivizing all the wrong things: backward-looking metrics, risk-aversion, and performance theater instead of actual performance. “Everyone’s afraid of saying they don’t know what’s working, so they just throw every buzzword they can at the board and hope nobody notices the emperor’s wearing attribution pixels and not much else.”

Holding companies? Keefer says they’re cooked. “They’ve become these Frankenstein monsters—cobbled-together tech stacks from a dozen acquisitions, duct-taped with the latest ‘AI announcement’ when their stock price drops.” According to him, these behemoths are “reimagining” themselves in press releases while getting eaten alive by five-person indie shops running tech-first, data-driven, AI-fueled media plans.

And here’s where he drops the real grenade: “The biggest disruption won’t come from massive indies,” he says. “It’ll come from tiny shops—five to ten people—with tools like Keen, interoperable systems, and massive margin advantages.”

Their advantage? According to Keefer, it’s not headcount. It’s headless stacks.

If “headless MarTech” sounds like something your agency made up to justify a rate card, think again. For Keefer, it’s very real—and it’s already happening. “We’re automating the entire workflow,” he says. “From ingesting 100% of working dollars, normalizing the data, modeling with AI, validating with incrementality, and pushing media plans directly into programmatic buying platforms.”

In short: AI doesn’t just analyze. It acts.

And yes, that means junior analysts, mid-level media planners, and maybe your overpriced slide deck are all on borrowed time. “AI agents are already replacing a lot of what analysts used to do,” he says. “Soon, a CFO will just say: ‘I’m a $100M food and beverage brand trying to grow 20%—go.’ And the system will do the rest.”

That’s not sci-fi. That’s 6–12 months out, according to him.

Keefer’s final gut punch? Most marketing departments are run like a blackjack table. High on adrenaline, short on strategy. “Marketing isn’t a line item. It’s an investment portfolio,” he says. “If you can’t forecast future value, you’re not a marketer—you’re a gambler with a vanity dashboard.”

And in this casino? The house is the CFO.

So what’s the metric that actually matters? How do you model marketing like a Wall Street analyst instead of a Mad Men extra with a TikTok login? And how is Keen making consultants obsolete by turning marketing mix models into real-time forecasting systems?

It’s all in Part 2 of this series:
👉 “The Metrics Coup: NPV, AI Forecasting, and the Death of Backward-Looking KPIs”

Stay Bold. Stay Curious. And Know More Than You Did Yesterday.