Performance marketing faced its most pointed industry critique in recent memory this week. AdExchanger's 'Cult of Performance' piece landed like a provocation, arguing that the industry's obsessive focus on last-click attribution and ROAS optimization has hollowed out brand-building capabilities and left marketers unable to justify upper-funnel investment. This wasn't an isolated opinion — Digiday's entertainment-first branding piece and the broader upfronts conversation about CTV's role both reinforced the idea that performance metrics alone can no longer account for how consumers actually move through purchase journeys. The MarTech Series piece on websites no longer being the beginning of the purchase journey added structural weight to this argument: with AI-powered search, social feeds, and recommendation engines intercepting intent earlier, pure performance attribution models are measuring an increasingly incomplete picture.
Incrementality testing emerged as the week's methodological counterpoint — AdExchanger's deep dive on how Martinelli's juice brand is approaching retail media incrementality, combined with a Reforge Blog piece on incrementality testing becoming the new standard for performance marketers, signals that the industry is actively searching for measurement frameworks that can bridge brand and performance. LinkedIn, Reddit, InMobi, and Ibotta were among the most active entities in this category, reflecting continued investment in performance channels even as the philosophical debate about their limits intensifies.