If you’ve led marketing long enough, you’ve lived this moment. You’re in a quarterly review meeting. Revenue’s under pressure, the pipeline isn’t where leadership expected it to be and everyone’s looking for answers. You open the deck and walk through the slides — multi-touch attribution, channel performance, funnel conversion, dashboards glowing with influence. You explain the trends, highlight what improved and contextualize what didn’t. Then someone asks the question that changes the tone, “What, exactly, is marketing accountable for?” That’s when the ground shifts because attribution doesn’t answer that question. It measures activity and maps touchpoints, but it doesn’t establish ownership. Over the past decade, attribution has become marketing’s stand-in for leadership. When results are strong, we point to the model. When they’re weak, we lean on them even harder. In the process, we’ve trained executives to trust dashboards more than judgment. That tradeoff is costing marketing credibility.…