What every CMO wishes their team already knew

Hi, I’m Cody. You can read about my official title and background on our Company page, but I’m the resident nerd here at Prescient HQ. I’ve seen some marketing effects play out time and again in my roles before Prescient. You probably have, too, and they’re the subject of my summer series—which is kicking off right here. 

Each week, we’ll explore one fundamental marketing law and examine the ripple effects that happen through your budget and bottom line when it’s ignored.

These aren’t abstract concepts. Understanding these laws will help you evaluate whether your current attribution approach is giving you actionable insights or just pretty dashboards. You’ll learn to spot when a platform’s methodology contradicts basic marketing principles, and more importantly, you’ll know what questions to ask before investing in new measurement tools.

The goal isn’t to make you a marketing theorist. It’s to give you the ability to quickly assess whether a measurement approach makes sense given how marketing actually works.

Your team deserves an all-star ally

You know that feeling when you’re interviewing candidates for a senior marketing role? One candidate walks in, immediately grasps your business challenges, and starts sketching out strategic solutions before you’ve finished explaining the role. Another candidate is sharp and enthusiastic but keeps asking basic questions about how different channels work together. It doesn’t take long to see that the second is more of a fit for a junior role.

The experienced marketer understands the underlying principles that govern how marketing actually works. They’ve seen these principles play out across dozens of campaigns, multiple companies, and various market conditions. They don’t need three months of onboarding to start contributing meaningful insights.

That’s us. Prescient AI was launched in 2019, but what we built is based on decades of experience seeing those same marketing effects play out across brand budgets large and small.

But here’s the thing: when it comes to marketing measurement and attribution tools, too many brands are settling for the junior candidate. They’re using platforms that sound sophisticated but don’t actually understand the fundamental laws that govern how marketing works in practice.

This disconnect between marketing reality and measurement capability is costing brands serious money. Tools that ignore how customers actually move through awareness and consideration phases will misattribute credit. Platforms that can’t account for how upper-funnel activities influence lower-funnel performance will undervalue your most important brand-building efforts. Attribution methods that treat each touchpoint as independent miss the compounding effects that make great marketing campaigns truly powerful.

Hiring someone junior isn’t always a disaster. But when you’re making decisions that affect millions in marketing spend, don’t you want measurement tools that bring senior-level understanding to the table?

Why the marketing laws matter more than ever

This is only the start of a series we’re launching over the coming weeks about the fundamental laws of marketing—the principles that experienced marketers know intuitively but that many measurement platforms completely ignore. These aren’t academic theories or consulting frameworks. They’re the practical realities that determine whether your campaigns actually work.

Think about the most successful marketing leaders you know. They understand that brand awareness doesn’t convert immediately but creates the conditions for all your other marketing to work better. They know that reaching the same person across multiple channels isn’t wasteful—it’s necessary for building the mental availability that drives purchase decisions. They’ve learned that customer journey isn’t a neat funnel but a messy, non-linear process where the same campaign might influence someone multiple times before they’re ready to buy.

These marketers don’t need to run incrementality tests to know their brand campaigns are working. They can see it in how their paid search campaigns perform better when brand awareness is higher. They can feel it in how much easier it becomes to launch new products when customers already trust the brand. They understand these dynamics because they’ve internalized the laws that govern how marketing actually functions.

Next week, we’ll start with the most fundamental law of all: why reaching the same person multiple times isn’t a bug in your marketing system—it’s a feature.