Blame Marketing All You Want: Here Are The Receipts That Prove You Wrong

Before we begin, I want to say something, directly from me, Clark Barron, to you— the marketer reading this.

In writing this piece, I saved this part, the intro, for last.

Because I choked up writing this... thinking of the countless times marketers have reached out to me, asking for help. Telling me about how they feel unseen, unheard, incompetent, crazy, worthless. How nothing they do seems to matter.

And I know that for every one that reached out, there are hundreds that didn't... that I couldn't help.

This is why Burn It Down exists.

The takedowns, the fire and brimstone, the radical candor, the confrontational air to it all— all for one purpose.

To look you in the eyes and tell you...
You are not incompetent.
You are not failing.
You are not crazy.

But if we all keep pretending we're ok with this. What marketing has been turned into...

We will all be complicit in its collapse.

Because everything we stand for—the craft, the science, the work, the actual goddamn purpose behind marketing—rides on what you’re about to read.

Not the article itself, but what it represents.

So for the rebels, the math nerds, the theater kids, the freaks, the data junkies, the artists, and even the "gurus"— For the lovers, the dreamers...and me.

This, dear friends, is where the rubber meets the road.

This isn’t just a call to action anymore.
This is a reckoning.

So buckle up.

Because I'm not lifting my foot until I either see God or a checkered flag.

I love you all, madly.

— Clark

"Jesus Christ... it’s all fake. All of it.
Marketing is fake.
I know it sounds like I’m having an existential breakdown, and I may be.
But digging into these big data contracts—Hockeystack, Bombora, 6sense, ZoomInfo...
It’s all 100% fucking fake.
Nothing about anything any marketer will ever see in a dashboard is true.
Unless it’s exclusively self-sourced, first-party data.
PERIOD. End of story. 100% Verifiable."

You want to know why everybody blames marketing?

Why sales says the leads are trash, why finance slashes your budget, why product thinks you don’t get it?

Why your CMO gets replaced every 18 months?

Because marketing is full of fake numbers built on fake signals from fake systems.

And you’ve been told to pretend it’s real.

Worse, you didn't even realize it wasn't.

It’s not your funnel.

It’s the illusion of a funnel, stitched together by third-party surveillance data and sold back to you as “insight.”

It’s not your CAC.

It’s a CAC calculated from recycled identities, enriched by vendors who siphon behavior from other people’s websites and claim they helped you “drive demand.”

It’s not your dashboard.

It’s a fucking stage prop—lit just right to make sure you take the fall when the numbers don’t line up.

You are not building strategy.

You are interpreting the output of a closed ecosystem that rewards pipeline theater and punishes critical thinking.

What you’ve been asked to do isn’t marketing.

It’s reconciliation— between numbers you didn’t generate and outcomes you’ll be blamed for...

...And I'm going to prove it.

You’ve reached the edge of the preview.
And yeah—this is where this shit gets good.

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The Consent Cartel: How Marketing Got Hijacked

Because here’s what they don’t want you to know:

First, consider all the “intent data” you’re optimizing for.

It’s not your audience.

It’s a behavioral residue—harvested from someone else’s funnel.

That “identity resolution” tool in your stack?
It’s not helping you understand your buyer.
It’s cross-stitching hashed emails, IP addresses, device IDs, cookie strings, and ad pixels into a reassembled profile of a person who never gave you consent to be profiled.

And it’s being done under one of the most violated phrases in modern marketing:

“Anonymous exhaust.”

They say it like it’s harmless.
Just some anonymous behavioral signals floating in the ether.
Nothing PII. Nothing traceable.
Just insight.

Bullshit.

Here’s what’s really happening:

Step 1: You use a vendor— say, an enrichment tool or an ABM platform.

You install the pixel.
You sync your CRM.
You feed in the leads.

They, the vendor you installed, extract every interaction—clicks, visits, email opens, even failed form fills—and strip out the identifiers.

Not to protect privacy.

To sidestep liability.

...and then feed that data into a co-op.

Step 2: Your data becomes part of the collective.

That’s the co-op model.

Vendors like Bombora, 5×5, ZoomInfo, Apollo, and RollWorks run on the same basic principle:

"You give us behavioral data (directly or indirectly). We enrich it, combine it, and sell it back— either to you or to someone else."

Some do this with browser plugins (ZoomInfo).
Some do it with SDKs (RollWorks).
Some do it via customer data contributions (Apollo).
Some have baked it into legally binding contracts (5×5).

But make no mistake:
Once it’s in the system, it doesn’t belong to you anymore.

And more importantly?
It never belonged to you in the first place.

Step 3: That recycled data gets sold back into the market—refined, enriched, and ready for attribution.

This is where the scam gets brilliant.

The vendors you’ve been told to trust take the co-op data pool and inject it into:

• Lead scoring models
• “Intent” indicators
• Account targeting recommendations
• Attribution dashboards

And now suddenly, your dashboard lights up like a Christmas tree.

"This account is surging."
"This campaign influenced $500K in pipeline."
"This content converted 18 MQLs."

Except...
none of it’s real.

What you’re seeing is:

• A guess
• Based on recycled behavior
• From people who never asked to be tracked
• Presented as proof that your strategy is working

It’s not attribution.
It’s performance theater— built on stolen signals.

The Outcome: You're blamed.

...for the performance of a system you don’t control, using data you didn’t source, powered by a cartel you didn’t even know you were funding.

And if you were to try to explain this to leadership?

You'll sound like you’re making excuses.

“But the data’s fake.”
“But the leads weren’t real.”
“But the intent signals came from someone else’s funnel.”

Doesn’t matter.
The dashboard said $2.3M in attributed influence.

And when that revenue doesn’t close?

You get blamed.

The Receipts: What the Contracts Actually Say

You think I’m being dramatic? I’m not.

Let’s read the fine print together.

Because what you’re about to see isn’t a hot take.

It’s contractual language—written by lawyers, enforced by signatures, and buried where most marketers never look.

This is how the surveillance cartel works.

The Perpetual License to Your Audience

From the Five by Five Participation Agreement:

Translation?

They own everything.

Once your audience interacts with a vendor you installed—clicks, scrolls, opens an email, or lands on a pixel—they can remix it, repackage it, and resell it. You don’t get a say.

And yes, it’s perpetual.
Even if you terminate.
Even if you leave the vendor.
Even if you never knew it was happening.

The Consent Laundering Clause

Page 14, same contract:

Notice what just happened?

They contractually offload consent requirements onto you—so they can power their surveillance product with your liability, not theirs.

They don't give a shit where you got it...
...just as long as they get it.

If your company didn’t collect it?
If you didn’t disclose the tracking?
If your forms didn’t say they’d end up in a data co-op?

That’s your problem.
Not theirs.

They get the enriched identity graph.
You get fired.

That one line—

“Contributions shall not be provided... unless the data subjects were first given explicit notice and an opportunity to opt out…”

—is the get-out-of-jail-free clause for the entire consent cartel.

It’s the same "plausible deniability through delegation" bullshit that Adam Robinson uses when defending RB2B's shady data practices.

Translation:

“We just built the surveillance machine.
If you use it to break the law? That’s on you.”

It’s weaponized accountability laundering.

The Data In, Revenue Out Model

From Apollo.io:

They don’t call it a co-op.
They call it “improving the platform.”

But make no mistake: you are the unpaid labor force fueling the product.

You feed in emails.
They validate, enrich, and add it to a master file.
Then sell that access to your competitors.

The Contact Extraction Model

From ZoomInfo’s “Community Edition”:

Let me say that again, in plain English:

You install the plugin.
It scrapes your inbox.
They resell the people you’ve talked to.

Your partnerships.
Your prospects.
Your clients.

Any shady shit you do that could be subpoenaed by an attorney that's smart enough to look...

All fair game.

And most marketers using this have no idea their sales team installed it.

The Enrichment Trap

From Clearbit:

You thought you were enriching your lead?

Nope.

You were donating their identity to the network.

Unless you negotiated enterprise terms and explicitly opted out—your CRM is feeding the surveillance network in real time.

The Common Denominator

All of these contracts—whether it's Bombora, 5x5, Clearbit, ZoomInfo, Apollo—boil down to the same ugly truth:

You are funding platforms that mine your audience, repackage the behavior, and sell it back to you as ‘insight’—often without you knowing they ever took it.

And when the numbers don’t add up?
When pipeline stalls?
When CAC spikes?

You take the blame.
The vendors take the profit.

And the co-op keeps growing.

Before we move on, I'm going to be absolutely surgical so there's no misinterpretation of what I've just laid out.

Let me make this crystal clear:

There is a reason you don’t hear stories of isolated marketing teams failing randomly.

→ Everyone using these tools is pulling from the same data co-ops, stitched signals, and recycled behavior.

→ The numbers you’re using to plan campaigns & measure performance aren’t unique. They’re mass-produced.

What this means:

You are not measuring the performance of your marketing team.

You are measuring the output of a third-party data machine everyone else is using.

The results are not based on your team’s strategy—they’re based on vendor behavior.

Any team using the same tools would get the same numbers.

Blaming marketing for underperformance is intellectually dishonest.

Why You Think It’s Working (But It’s Not)

Sometimes the numbers look good.

A campaign hits.

Sales says the leads weren’t that bad.

A few deals close.

And so you think the system works.

But let me explain something to you:

You are being handed a fish in a barrel— and you think you’re a sniper because you hit one.

The co-op you’re tapped into is feeding you recycled demand, known buyers, and stolen intent that your competitors also have access to. You're not generating demand.

You're colliding with it—by accident—inside a rigged loop that rewards whoever happens to show up near the close.

That’s not strategy.
That’s not attribution.
That’s not success.

That’s just survivorship bias dressed up as insight.

So yeah, you hit the target every now and then.

But don’t confuse dumb luck inside a closed system…

...with marketing.

THE HIERARCHY OF BLAME

Tier 1 – Surveillance Data Networks (Co-Op Vendors)

Harvest behavior. Stitch identities. Fuel the graph.

• Bombora — OG intent co-op with a massive publisher network.
• 5x5 — Contracts your audience straight into the hive mind.
• ZoomInfo — Scrapes inboxes, CRMs, and sells it all back.
• Apollo — Enriches and redistributes your CRM behind your back.
• Clearbit — Real-time enrichment that defaults to public resale.
• RollWorks — ABM pixel network disguised as precision targeting.
• Cognism — GDPR-washed data broker with a polished UK veneer.
• Lusha — “Crowdsourced” contact data straight from your inbox.
• UserGems — Job-change tracking with CRM fingerprinting.
• Slintel — Pre-acquisition: Apollo-style scraping. Now: 6sense bolt-on.
• Leadfeeder / Albacross / RB2B — Reverse-IP meets LinkedIn stalking. Ethics not included.

Tier 2 – Data Derivatives + Attribution Middlemen

Take co-op data and make it look like signal.

• 6sense — Stitched behavior sold as clairvoyance.
• Demandbase — “Intent” wrapped in ABM lipstick.
• Mutiny — Personalization powered by behavior you didn’t collect.
• Terminus — Retroactive influence playbook, repackaged.
• Dreamdata — Attribution dashboards built on stitched history.
• CaliberMind — Multi-touch models with mystery meat sources.
• Bizible (Adobe) — The OG in making bullshit look enterprise-ready.
• Factors.ai — Dreamdata-lite with prettier overlays.
• Windsor.io — “Influence” fueled by stitched journeys and vibes.
• Metadata.io — Programmatic “demand gen” built on co-op data.

Tier 3 – CRM + MAP Systems (Reporting Gatekeepers)

Where the stitched numbers become “truth.”

• HubSpot — Clean UX, dirty data if you’re not watching.
• Salesforce — Where stitched signals become gospel.
• Marketo — Stale, bloated, still gatekeeping attribution.
• Pardot — Salesforce’s under-loved Frankenstein MAP.

Tier 4 – Dashboard, Reporting, and RevOps Stack

Where the performance theater lights up.

• HockeyStack — The sexiest way you’ll ever be gaslit by a dashboard.
• GTMHub — OKRs built on whatever garbage comes in.
• Funnel.io — Connects your dirty pipes into clean-looking graphs.
• Tableau / Looker / PowerBI — Polished visuals over polluted data lakes.
• Wynter (fringe) — Audience feedback that still shapes attribution decisions.

Tier 5 – The Marketer

✅ Responsible for results.

✅ Powerless to validate inputs.

✅ Held accountable for metrics built on systems 5 layers removed from reality.

The vendors know what they’re doing is questionable at best and illegal at worst. And instead of stopping it, (Which, why would they, it's their entire company) they’ve just outsourced the risk to you.

They retain:

• The derivative data
• The revenue
• The legal distance

You retain:

• The exposure
• The regulatory risk
• The brand damage
• The career-ending conversations with your CEO

You thought you were building pipeline.
You’ve been feeding your funnel into a surveillance network.

And then they have the audacity to say:

"You're the data controller."

Bullshit. You're the scapegoat.

A Marketing Data Autopsy

What do you think happens when you pull a list from ZoomInfo?

Seriously.
Close your eyes and picture the workflow.

Easy, right?

You
→ Pull list
→ Load into CRM
→ Build campaign
→ Launch ads + outreach
→ Measure performance
→ Show impact
→ Win respect

Clean. Simple. Measurable.
Feels like science.

Here's what's actually going on:

You
↓ Pull list (ZoomInfo)
  • From scraped inboxes
  • From other users’ CRMs
  • From co-op networks like 5×5
↓ Data enters CRM
↓ Intent data overlays (Bombora, 6sense, RollWorks)
  • Enriched using 3rd-party web behavior
  • Tracked across thousands of websites
  • Merged using IPs, hashed emails, device IDs
↓ You build campaigns off enriched profiles
↓ You run ads
↓ You pixel your site
↓ Your site activity is harvested
  • Contributed to a data co-op (if your vendor requires it)
  • Used to enrich someone else’s profile
  • Fed back into the co-op to refine the “graph”
↓ You measure performance
  • Dashboard lights up
  • Attribution says “$1.3M in pipeline”
  • None of it is traceable to real buyer intent
↓ Sales says leads are garbage
↓ You get blamed
↓ You’re fired

TL;DR

You thought you were launching a campaign.

What you were actually doing was laundering behavioral data through a closed system, powered by co-ops, stitched identity graphs, and repackaged surveillance.

And when it fails?

They keep the money.
They keep the data.
You lose the job.

"B...B...But all marketers should all be data-driven! How else are they supposed to prove their worth?!"

Ahem...

The Myth of the Data-Driven Marketer

Every metric you report.
Every “surging” account.
Every intent spike.
Every enrichment record.

All of it is tainted by a system that never had accuracy in mind.

Most marketers are not optimizing for performance. They’re coping with the fallout of being lied to by their stack.

This is the full-frontal perspective shift marketers need:

You’re not “data-driven.”
You’re vendor-manipulated.
You’re dashboard-gaslit.

Your KPIs were never real in the first place.

And when it doesn’t work?

They tell you to optimize.
To A/B test harder.
To “lean into the funnel.”

No one tells you the entire foundation is fake.

TL:DR — If the data is certifiable bullshit, then being a “data-driven marketer” is the most self-defeating thing you could possibly strive for."

The Attribution Mirage

Attribution is not proof of performance.

It’s a pre-written story your vendor is waiting for you to believe.

The numbers in your attribution model are not independent confirmations of strategy—they’re consequences of the system’s own feedback loop. Most models don’t track causality. They infer it. From data that was stitched together to begin with.

Your content wasn’t clicked. It was backfilled into a journey. Your campaign didn’t cause revenue. The graph told a story the dashboard needed to tell.

What’s under the hood?

• Retroactive touchpoint inflation
• "Influenced" vs "sourced" sleight-of-hand
• Cookie stitching from third-party data
• 90-day lookbacks that count ad impressions your ICP never saw

Marketers think they’re doing science. They’re doing improv with props.

The Illusion of Consent

Let’s be clear: this isn’t just a marketing problem. It’s a human one.

That buyer who downloaded your whitepaper never opted into being tagged across 5,000 websites. Never asked to be fed into a graph. Never gave permission for their behavioral residue to be scraped, stitched, and turned into a dashboard metric.

Real consent is active, clear, and informed. 'Anonymous intent' is surveillance—wrapped in legalese and laundered through plausible deniability.

And you’ve been handed the liability.

Not the power.

This is not a "bad actors" problem.

This is the system.

How This Fuels Misalignment

Bad data doesn't just hurt marketing. It shatters internal alignment.

• Sales gets leads that were never real.
• Product builds based on fake personas.
• Customer Success inherits misqualified accounts.
• Leadership loses trust in the numbers—because they're right to.

Everyone is miscalibrated. And marketing becomes the punching bag.

The System Was Designed This Way

This wasn’t an accident. This was by design.

The surveillance stack exists because:

• VCs needed rapid, measurable growth.
• Attribution vendors needed stickier contracts.
• Martech companies needed new upsells.

So they created an illusion of measurement that looked scientific but never was.

It’s not broken. It was built this way.

Just like the credit rating agencies during the housing crisis—those who sell the product are the ones who grade it.

And we wonder why people like Adam Robinson, who is a former credit default swap trader at Lehman Brothers... are the ones that are now coming into this industry professing to have the fucking Holy Grail of GTM tools.

It’s a goddamn synthetic data market—just like synthetic CDOs—manufactured by vendors who sell the risk, grade their own performance, offload the liability, and profit from the churn.

Stop pretending you don't know how this ends...

These people know what they're doing and they're going to ruin your entire profession.

What Real Marketing Looks Like Now

This isn’t about purity. It’s about power.

Real marketing:

• Uses clean, self-sourced first-party data
• Measures human response, not synthetic signals
• Builds systems buyers want to engage with
• Avoids dark-funnel hacks and fake attribution
• Centers trust, creativity, and strategic clarity

You don’t have to play their game.

You can choose the hard way. The honest way. The one that takes longer to prove, but can’t be taken from you when the dashboard falls apart.

No more excuses. No more co-ops. No more cowardice.

Marketing is worth saving. But we have to burn down the bullshit first.

You know that poll I posted yesterday?

What should marketing be held accountable for?

Out of 117 votes,

"Revenue Attribution"

...came in dead last.

And you know what came first?

Brand impact.

Not CAC.
Not pipe.
Not some stitched-together spreadsheet of recycled buyer signals.

Brand.

The thing that can’t be faked.
The thing the co-ops can’t manufacture.
The thing the data can’t steal.

Marketers know the truth.
They’ve just been too afraid to say it out loud.

And my poll?

The poll wasn’t research.

It was proof.

🍿 Intermission 🍿

Texting my attorney from a gas station burner phone.
If you’re reading this, I’ve already wiped the drives.

Grab a Capri Sun.
Eat some orange slices.

If this article vanishes...
you didn’t see shit.

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Dear Non-Marketers:

Let me make this painfully clear.

If you're a CEO, Founder, CRO—
Hell, if you're still a clueless CMO...

When you blame marketing for bad leads, missed numbers, and soft pipeline, remember this—

Here is what I just proved to you:

• The “data” marketing is forced to use is fake.
• The tools in the stack are built on stolen behavior.
• The attribution models are rigged to tell stories, not truths.
• The contracts bury liability and offload legal risk onto the marketer.
• The dashboards are theater.
• The signals are recycled.
• The math is fraud.

Marketing is not the reason your pipeline sucks— Your system is.

It’s built to blame the only department forced to justify numbers from tools they didn’t choose, don’t control, and were never empowered to challenge.

Did you hear what I just said?

So unless you can prove the signals are sourced ethically, the numbers are derived cleanly, and the dashboards reflect reality—

You have no right to blame marketing.

How to (actually) get your shit together:

Step 1: Admit What You Didn’t Know

• Read the article.
• Acknowledge—out loud—that marketing has been forced to operate inside a surveillance-driven stack they didn’t fully understand.
• Drop the defensiveness. You’re not being blamed. You’re being handed a lifeline.

“We made decisions we thought were smart. We didn’t know how broken the system underneath actually was. But we do now. So let’s fix it.”

Step 2: Conduct a Vendor Stack Audit (LISTEN UP CROs)

• Ask: “Where is our buyer data coming from—and who really owns it?”
• Identify which vendors rely on:
  • Co-op enrichment
  • Cookie stitching
  • Reverse IP and device graphs
  • Inbox scraping
  • Fine print consent laundering
• Cancel any tool that depends on third-party surveillance without provable consent.

Marketing shouldn’t need to hire a forensics team to justify pipeline.

Clean data or cut it loose.

Step 3: Restore Ownership to Marketing

• Stop blaming marketing for systems they didn’t architect.
• Stop treating them like SDRs with Canva licenses.
• Give marketing full veto power over any tool that affects reporting, attribution, or buyer trust.

If you're holding someone accountable for a number, they better have control over the inputs.

Marketing does not generate revenue.
Marketing generates the ability to generate revenue.

Step 4: Rebuild Your Definition of Success

• Remove “influenced pipeline” and third-party intent metrics from OKRs.
• Replace them with:
  • First-party engagement
  • Brand trust lift
  • Buyer clarity and readiness
  • Direct-sourced pipeline (first-touch AND self-reported)
• Let marketing define metrics aligned to human buying behavior, not stitched clickstreams.

Step 5: Fund Brand Like It’s Revenue Infrastructure

• You want long-term compounding demand?
  • Fund brand.
  • Fund narrative.
  • Fund creative.
• Not because it feels good.
  • Because it builds trust that can't be reverse-engineered by a spreadsheet.

Brand is not decoration. It’s demand insurance.

Step 6: Publicly Back Your Team

Let me tell you about your marketing team...

They've felt unheard, unseen, set up to fail, incompetent, ashamed, disillusioned, and worthless.

And if you don't get your shit together and start paying attention, you're going to lose an entire generation of some of the most talented, passionate marketers to walk the planet.

• Say it in the boardroom.
• Say it in the all-hands.
• Say it on Slack.
• Let your marketing team know:
  “You’re not crazy. The system was. We’re fixing it.”

You signed off on the stack.
You funded the vendors.
You believed the co-op hype.
You ignored the fine print.

You don’t get to blame the people who work for you when they were never given a system that worked for them.

So if you want to talk accountability?
Start with your reflection.

Because nothing—and I mean nothing— rebuilds trust faster than executive accountability.

Step 7:

Shut up and let these people do their goddamn job.