Marketing is math: the framework I use to run AI-native teams.
A short, opinionated framework for running marketing as a math problem. Five inputs, three outputs, one weekly review.
Every marketing leader I know runs the same Monday meeting. Pull last week’s numbers. Read the deck. Decide what to do about the numbers. Forty-five minutes. Half the room is on Slack.
I cut that meeting in half by making the math explicit. Five inputs, three outputs, a weekly review that any IC can run. Here is the working.
The five inputs
Every marketing org operates on five inputs, and only five. Most leaders cannot name them in order.
- Audience — who you are reaching.
- Hook — what makes them care.
- Channel — where you find them.
- Cadence — how often.
- Offer — what you ask of them.
Anything else — design system, brand book, MarTech stack, attribution model — is downstream of these five. If your week’s plan does not change at least one input, you are running on inertia.
The three outputs
- Pipeline — qualified opportunities the sales team will work.
- Velocity — speed of pipeline through stages.
- Retention — net dollar retention on the customers you already won.
Notice what is not on the list: traffic, MQLs, follower count, NPS. Those are leading indicators. They are diagnostics, not the job.
The weekly review
Twenty minutes. One sheet. Three columns: input, last week’s change, this week’s change. The agent does the math. The leader does the editing. The team does the work.
Every input either moved or did not. Every output either moved or did not. The review is just the reconciliation between the two. If the inputs moved and the outputs did not, your math is wrong. If the outputs moved and the inputs did not, you got lucky and you cannot repeat it.
What changes when you run this way
Three things happen. First, the team stops debating tactics; they debate the inputs, which is where the leverage is. Second, the agents do most of the math because the math is now explicit. Third, the Monday meeting takes twelve minutes.
The framework is not new. It is what every quant in finance has been doing since 1987. Marketing has been operating on vibes for forty years because the data was not good enough to do otherwise. The data is good enough now. The teams that do the math win the decade.
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