Dashboards, MQL counts, board decks - we know them, we love them. But, they're strangling the best creative ideas at approval stage. Why? Because cool ideas rarely equate to attributed funnel growth. We make the argument for Big Creative deserving more in B2B SaaS.
If a Lack of Attribution Is Wrong, Why Does It Feel So Right?
.webp)
You pitch a bold, original campaign. Something clever. Something with cultural punch. And the first question you get?
“How will we track leads from it?”
The honest answer? You probably won’t. At least not in the neat, linear, dashboard-friendly way the sales team or board would like.
That’s become a dangerous problem in B2B marketing.
Because somewhere between the rise of martech and the endless need to prove value to the business, marketing got redefined. It became a lead engine. A unit of pipeline production. And attribution became the only language it was allowed to speak.
Attribution can be helpful, but only when it’s honest and reflects how people actually buy. Not just how CRM systems record them.
The truth is: great marketing doesn’t follow a tidy trail.
You know this already. The best stuff – the stuff that gets talked about in group chats and Slack channels, the idea a competitor grudgingly says was ‘actually quite good,’ the campaign someone remembers nine months later when they’re finally ready to buy – rarely shows up in your attribution software. But that doesn’t mean it didn’t work. It just means you’re looking in the wrong place.
Let’s call this kind of work Big Creative. The type of marketing that’s hard to track but impossible to ignore.
Here’s how you make the case for it...
Attribution is not the remit
The purpose of marketing is not to feed Salesforce dashboards.
The purpose of marketing is to make people care. To influence decisions. To be remembered when it matters.
But because most creative work isn’t easily attributable (especially anything outside your website or ad manager), marketers have stopped pushing for it. They’re scared of being asked for numbers they can’t cleanly provide, so they default to ‘safe’ tactics like gated content, PPC, and bottom-of-funnel nurture flows.
Unless it has a QR code glued to it, creativity has been systematically deprioritised.
This is short-term thinking. The buying process doesn’t begin with a demo request. It begins much earlier, when a potential buyer first becomes aware of your brand and forms an impression.
Research from 6sense shows that nearly 70% of B2B buyers are already through their decision-making process before they even talk to sales. Big Creative is one of the few tools that can reach this audience.
That’s its job. Not to close the deal, but to set the stage for one.
If you can’t track leads, track lift
Your campaign goes live.
You don’t see a flood of demo requests overnight. But the following week, web traffic jumps. Brand search volume climbs. A few unexpected intros come in. Your sales team starts hearing more “I’ve seen you around lately” on calls.
That’s impact… it’s just not linear. And that’s what makes it hard to attribute, but no less meaningful.
We get it. This kind of evidence feels soft, and in a world where “what’s the ROI?” is a daily question, it can feel uncomfortable to point at momentum rather than metrics.
But here’s the shift: If traffic, engagement, or even sales velocity starts moving in the right direction after a big campaign, it’s not a coincidence. It might not be proof in the attribution sense, but it’s a pattern. And patterns are how you spot real influence in complex systems.
Think of this less like a tracked journey and more like a pressure system. Your creative doesn’t follow a lead from ad to form. It changes the weather and creates conditions for buying.
Listen to closed-won clues
Not every signal comes from a spreadsheet. Sometimes, your best attribution lives in sales calls, not the CRM.
Things like:
- “We’ve seen you around a lot lately.”
- “Someone on our team shared your LinkedIn ad in Slack.”
- “That guide you made has us rethinking our approach.”
Those are clues. They point to brand awareness, mindshare, and positioning that landed.
Whether they come from a LinkedIn stunt or a weird direct mail idea, they mean the buyer remembered you and then brought that memory into the buying process.
That’s attribution. Just not the kind that’s captured in a UTM parameter.
Want to be thorough? Pair it with closed-won/lost reason analysis. Get your sales team to tag creative mentions and add a qualitative field in Salesforce for ‘how they first heard of us.’ This stuff builds a case, even if it doesn’t export neatly to a dashboard.
When demand gen works, ask why
Performance marketers often complain about poor conversion rates without even questioning what’s feeding the funnel in the first place.
That ‘demand’ has to come from somewhere. And more often than not, it’s built upstream by brand, buzz, and campaigns that don’t get clicked immediately but stick around in the mind until someone is ready to act.
If your demo requests suddenly double…
If your paid social starts getting better CTRs…
If your MQL-to-SQL rate quietly improves…
That might just be your Big Creative at work.
Take Surreal. It’s cereal that’s sold in the same supermarkets as Kellogg’s and Nestlé, so it has to work harder to get noticed. Sure, it’s got solid macros and decent ingredients. Maybe even better than the usual big players. But that’s not what draws you in...
It’s the OOH ads, the creative LinkedIn company profile. The copy that makes you laugh, or at least look twice. The tone that makes it feel like more than just breakfast. That’s what sticks. It makes you remember them. Maybe even go looking for them. Or, when you're staring at a shelf of options, it’s the one you pick up because you know the brand.
That’s what builds desire. Not because someone needs it now, but because they want it.
And when that kind of creative starts driving business, the retailers pay attention. Distribution follows demand. In B2B, that looks like new partnerships, inbound from resellers, or analyst firms suddenly wanting to align with you because you’ve made yourself unignorable.
Creativity scales influence in a way that rational messaging never can.
This will always feel a bit uncomfortable
At some point, you’ll have to decide:
Are we only doing the things we can measure?
Or are we doing the things that actually move people?
Because creativity doesn’t always show up in the data, but it does show up in the business. You’ll feel it in the sales cycle. You’ll hear it in calls. You’ll see it in sentiment.
You might not be able to prove it in the exact way leadership wants, but that doesn’t make it wrong. It just means your job is to shift the conversation from “how many leads?” to questions like: Did traffic rise? Are people engaging more thoughtfully in sales conversations?
And maybe most importantly: Are we visibly present in our category? This is not just a gut feeling. What signals would tell us we’re present? Are analyst firms mentioning us unprompted? Are other brands looking to collaborate? Are our event stands packed while others sit quiet?
These are the right questions to ask when the work is too good to measure.
Final word: Creative first, attribution Second
You have a choice. You can keep killing big ideas because they don’t come with perfect tracking, or you can acknowledge the fact that marketing isn’t physics.
It’s psychology.
Some of the most successful campaigns in history had no clear logic. Cadbury’s drumming gorilla? No message. No CTA. Just a feeling. But it worked because it made people want the brand.
So here’s our take:
Yes, attribution matters. But if you use it as your only filter, you’ll never make anything memorable.
Big Creative is how brands grow. It’s how you stay front-of-mind. It’s what makes a business feel like a brand.
So if you're sitting on a weird, brilliant idea, don’t bury it just because you can’t track it.
Run it. Back it. And watch what happens.
B2B ideas from big thinkers
Join our community of 20,000+ who receive the best in content marketing and advertising insights, monthly.
.png)
