The Godfather of AI Attribution: Jeff Greenfield on What’s Wasting Your Ad Spend

Marketing has entered a new era—one where clicks don’t tell the truth, dashboards don’t agree, and platforms all take too much credit. That’s the conversation Jeff Greenfield, CEO and co-founder of Provalytics, brought to the forefront during his guest appearance on the Vendasta Podcast, an industry-leading show exploring AI-powered customer acquisition and engagement.

In this episode, Jeff dives deep into why traditional measurement models are collapsing, why impression-based attribution is replacing click-based logic, and how Provalytics uses AI to unify the entire customer journey—without cookies, tags, or user-level tracking.

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Clicks Don’t Create Sales—Attention Does

Jeff opens with a myth most marketers still believe:

“We invest dollars to buy clicks.”

But that thinking is broken. As Jeff explains, marketers invest dollars to buy attention, and impressions—not clicks—are the earliest sign that a campaign is working.

He illustrates this through his now-famous “hose example”:

A consumer sees a Meta ad for a no-leak hose.
They don’t click.
Two weeks later, their hose breaks.
They remember the brand, Google it, click a search ad, and buy.

GA4 credits Google Search.
Meta gets nothing.
Reality? Meta created the demand.

Jeff calls this the duplication dilemma—a trap caused by platforms that measure in isolation and claim credit without context.

Cookie-Based Attribution Is Dead

During the conversation, Jeff and the Vendasta hosts explore how decades of dependence on cookies have blinded marketers to the bigger picture. Tracking people across apps, platforms, and devices is now nearly impossible.

Walled gardens are everywhere.
GA4 only sees the last action.
Click-based attribution ignores 80% of influence.

According to Jeff, “If you’re measuring using clicks, CTV will never work for you. Digital out-of-home will never work for you. Meta will never scale the way your competitors claim it does.”

The message is clear:

We’ve outgrown user-level tracking. It’s time to rethink measurement entirely.

Impressions: The New Universal Metric

Jeff explains why impressions—not clicks—are the only scalable, realistic metric for modern marketing:

Every channel, including paid search, is impression-based
Impressions reflect attention, reach, and creative exposure
Impressions unify digital and traditional media
Impressions give marketers a number they can actually optimize

This shift allows Provalytics to measure channels GA4 can’t, including:

Connected TV
Linear TV
Podcasts
Digital out-of-home
YouTube on TV
Upper-funnel Meta campaigns

Clicks only show the final step.
Impressions tell the full story.

How AI Finally Solves Multi-Touch Attribution

One of the most compelling parts of the episode is Jeff’s breakdown of how AI uncovers hidden micro-experiments inside every marketing plan.

Marketers don’t realize it, but every small fluctuation in impression volume creates thousands of natural experiments each month. Humans could never analyze these patterns—but AI can.

By examining these variations and running hundreds of thousands of “what-if” simulations, Provalytics’ AI determines:

What created incremental lift
Which campaigns truly moved the needle
Where diminishing returns begin
How to reallocate budget to generate more ROI
Which upper-funnel channels secretly drive lower-funnel conversions

In Jeff’s words:

“The greatest thing about AI is it enables us to see what we can’t see ourselves.”

Branding Is More Powerful Than Performance—If You Measure It Correctly

Jeff and the Vendasta hosts also discuss a major problem in digital marketing: the industry’s obsession with bottom-funnel “performance” campaigns.

Decades of research show that over-investing in the bottom of the funnel decreases long-term effectiveness. Why?

Because it reduces reach.
It eliminates emotional storytelling.
It suffocates brand memory.

With impression-based attribution, Provalytics connects branding directly to financial outcomes—something CFOs have been demanding for years.

Brand ads no longer live in a “soft metrics” silo.
They are now quantifiable contributors to revenue.

The New Attribution Blueprint for Modern Marketers

By the end of the episode, Jeff outlines the new foundations of effective measurement:

Stop chasing clicks
Measure impressions, not users
Let AI find the incremental truth
Use a single source of truth across all channels
Balance branding and performance for healthy long-term growth

This is the future of attribution—and it’s what Provalytics delivers today.

Ready to Stop Guessing and Start Seeing the Truth?

Jeff’s appearance on the Vendasta Podcast makes one point unmistakable:

Clicks lie. Dashboards mislead. Platforms exaggerate.
But AI-powered, impression-first attribution reveals what’s actually driving performance.

If you want to uncover the real impact of your marketing and finally know where to invest your next dollar, Provalytics is the measurement system built for this new era.