The Temptation to Skip the Research When leadership gives you a growth mandate, the pressure to move is immediate. Build the campaign. Launch the product. Fix the funnel. The instinct is to start doing — and figure out the details as you go. At M&T Bank, we had that pressure. Customer growth was lagging behind competitors. Attrition was climbing. There was executive appetite to build a new engagement model for the small-to-medium business vertical, and there was no shortage o

The Promise vs. The Reality If you've ever sat in a room where someone says "we just need better attribution," you know the feeling. There's a collective nod. Everyone agrees. And then six months later, you have a new dashboard, a pile of channel data, and roughly the same amount of uncertainty about what's actually driving results. Multi-touch attribution is genuinely useful. But it's also one of the most misunderstood tools in marketing — especially for teams that are newer

When I joined M&T Bank's small business marketing team, we had a growth problem — and not the fun kind. New checking account acquisition was lagging behind competitors. The content we were putting out was mostly white-labeled, recycled across business lines, and not tied to any real understanding of what our customers actually needed. Executive leadership wanted a new engagement model for the small-to-medium business vertical. We had appetite and runway. What we needed was a