CTV and streaming companies sell brands and agencies on clean measurement, then run their own marketing pipeline on a CRM field nobody fills in and a board deck assembled by hand every quarter. Winston Francois builds the attribution model, touch tracking, and board-ready dashboard that shows which NewFronts meeting, conference, or outbound sequence is actually producing closed deals – not just how much you spent getting there.
The Problem
Your own pipeline attribution is worse than what you sell brands
CTV ad platforms and measurement vendors build their reputation on telling brands what actually drove their revenue, but ask the same VP Marketing where last quarter's enterprise deals originated and the answer is a shrug and a CRM field that defaults to blank. The sales cycle for landing a national brand or a holding-company trading desk routinely runs 6 to 18 months and touches a dozen people – media planners, biz dev, procurement, legal – so a single lead-source field captures none of the real story.
Marketing spend concentrates into a handful of expensive, hard-to-isolate moments
Most of the CTV marketing calendar collapses into the NewFronts, the upfronts, CES, and two or three trade events – IAB ALM, Possible, Cannes – where a large share of the annual budget goes out in a few weeks. A deal that closes four months after a NewFronts meeting could have started there, or at a follow-up dinner, or from an outbound sequence that landed the same week, and without instrumented touch tracking across those channels the renewal budget conversation defaults to 'we've always gone to NewFronts' instead of a real answer.
Board and investor reporting doesn't map to a standard SaaS marketing slide
A Series A or B CTV company answering to a board is still expected to show CAC and marketing-sourced pipeline like any other software company, but the underlying deal flow mixes programmatic self-serve signups, direct-sold IOs negotiated over months, and OEM or publisher partnership deals that never touch a lead form. Forcing all three into one blended CAC number hides more than it reveals, and a board member who has sat through a hundred SaaS decks will ask the follow-up question marketing currently cannot answer.
The category's measurement credibility problem becomes the company's own problem
CTV as an ad category has spent years fighting a reputation for inflated reach claims, walled-garden reporting, and dashboards nobody fully trusts, and a company operating inside that category that cannot produce a clean, defensible account of its own marketing performance is reinforcing the exact skepticism it is trying to sell brands out of.
How We Help
We start by pulling whatever pipeline and marketing data already exists – CRM stage history, event attendee lists, account-based outreach logs, self-serve signup data if the business runs a trial or freemium motion alongside direct sales, and whatever finance currently reports to the board.
From there we build an attribution model sized to how the business actually sells, not a generic first-touch or last-touch template borrowed from a PLG SaaS playbook.
Execution means instrumenting the touches that currently live nowhere – tagging event attendance and follow-up meetings in the CRM, logging analyst briefings and press hits as marketing touches instead of PR line items nobody connects to revenue, and building the account-based outreach tracking that ties a sequence to the specific accounts it actually reached.
The last piece is the reporting layer built for the room it actually needs to work in – a board meeting, not a marketing team standup.
What makes this different from handing the problem to an internal analyst or a generic BI consultant is that we have built this kind of reporting for companies whose own product is media or measurement, so we know where the numbers have to hold up to a harder audience – a board member, or a brand's internal analytics team doing diligence before signing a seven-figure IO.
If your last board deck used the word 'roughly' more than once when describing where deals came from, that is the starting point for this engagement – book a strategy call and we will walk through what a defensible pipeline attribution model looks like for your specific sales motion.
What we deliver
- Multi-touch pipeline attribution model matched to your actual sales motion – direct-sold enterprise, self-serve, or both – not a generic first-touch or last-touch template
- CRM and touch-tracking instrumentation for events, analyst relations, and account-based outreach – the touches that currently go untracked
- Board-ready marketing-sourced and marketing-influenced pipeline reporting, with a CAC calculation that does not blend enterprise and self-serve motions into one misleading number
- Channel performance view across the NewFronts and upfronts, the conference circuit, and ABM outreach so renewal budget decisions have real data behind them
The company that sells brands clarity on their CTV spend usually cannot tell its own board where its last ten deals came from – fix that gap before a prospect's diligence team finds it first.
Our Methodology
We treat this as two separate problems that get conflated into one: attribution (what marketing touch actually influenced a deal) and reporting (how that gets communicated to a board or investor). Most CTV companies at this stage have built neither cleanly – reporting exists as a slide deck assembled by hand each quarter, and attribution exists as whatever a sales rep remembers to type into a CRM note. We build the attribution model first, because a well-designed dashboard sitting on untrustworthy attribution just makes bad numbers easier to present with confidence.
The 90-day sprint starts with the audit and model design, moves into instrumentation and a first reporting cycle, and ends with a board-ready dashboard the internal team can run without us in the room. Because CTV company sales cycles routinely run 6 to 18 months, one 90-day sprint will not produce a full closed-loop attribution read on deals that started before the engagement began – we are explicit about that going in, and we build the model to start capturing clean data immediately so the second and third quarters of reporting get sharper, not the first.
How We Work
The first 30 days are audit and model design. We pull CRM history, event and analyst-relations touch data (or the lack of it), and whatever board reporting exists today, then design the attribution model against your actual sales motion. You leave this phase with a written attribution framework and a gap list of what needs to be instrumented before the first clean reporting cycle.
Days 30 to 60 are instrumentation and build – CRM fields and workflows for event, AR, and ABM touches go live, and we build the first version of the board dashboard using whatever historical data can be reasonably reconstructed. This is also when we work directly with whoever owns your CRM or RevOps stack, since attribution work lives or dies on whether the underlying data-entry habits actually change.
By day 90 you have a board-ready dashboard, a documented attribution model, and one full reporting cycle behind you – enough to walk into the next board meeting with a marketing-sourced pipeline number you can defend instead of round to the nearest guess.
Team structure is a lead who owns the attribution model and board narrative, plus an analytics operator who builds and maintains the CRM instrumentation and dashboard. Cadence is a weekly working session during the build phase, moving to a monthly check-in tied to your board cycle once reporting is live. Initial engagements typically run three to six months, often re-scoped around the next board meeting or budget cycle.
- A defensible marketing-sourced and marketing-influenced pipeline number for board and investor reporting
- Clean attribution across a multi-touch, 6-18 month enterprise sales cycle instead of a single lead-source field
- A CAC calculation that separates direct-sold enterprise motion from any self-serve signups
- Channel-level clarity on whether the NewFronts, the conference circuit, or ABM outreach is actually producing closed deals
If your ctv / connected tv company needs marketing analytics leadership, we should talk.
Expand your marketing team output with our experts
Let us take a custom approach to your growth goals by assembling and leading the best-in-class marketing team to support your next stage.
Frequently asked questions
How much does marketing analytics work cost for a CTV company?
Most engagements at this scope run $8,000 to $20,000 a month depending on how many data sources we are reconciling and whether we are also building the self-serve side of the attribution model alongside the enterprise motion. A company with a single CRM and a handful of channels to instrument sits toward the lower end; a company running direct-sold, programmatic, and OEM partnership deal flow through separate systems costs more to unify.
How long before we see results?
You get a written attribution framework and a gap list within the first 30 days, and a first-version board dashboard by day 60. Because enterprise CTV sales cycles run 6 to 18 months, a full closed-loop read on deals that started before the engagement is not realistic in 90 days – what you do get quickly is clean data capture going forward, so the second and third reporting cycles get materially sharper.
How does the Winston Francois team integrate with our marketing and RevOps staff?
We work directly with whoever owns your CRM and RevOps stack rather than handing over a framework and leaving. The attribution model only works if the people entering data into the CRM every day actually change how they log event touches, analyst briefings, and outreach, so we build the instrumentation alongside them, not for them.
What makes Winston Francois different from an internal analyst hire or a generic BI consultant?
An internal analyst usually inherits whatever CRM mess already exists and lacks the mandate to change how sales and marketing log activity. A generic BI consultant builds a dashboard on top of data nobody has validated.
How do you measure ROI on the analytics engagement itself?
The scorecard is whether you can produce a marketing-sourced and marketing-influenced pipeline number you would defend in a board meeting, whether CAC is reported separately for enterprise and self-serve motions instead of blended, and whether you can say with real data which channel – events, ABM, or content – is actually producing closed deals. Those are binary, checkable outcomes, not a vague improvement claim.
What type of CTV company is the right fit for this?
This fits CTV ad platforms, streaming app publishers, measurement and attribution vendors, and FAST channel operators at Series A through growth stage, roughly $5M to $100M in ARR, that are selling into brands and agencies on a multi-month sales cycle and currently cannot produce a clean answer to 'where did our last ten deals come from.' It is a poor fit for a pre-revenue company with no closed deals yet to attribute – that team should wait until there is a pipeline history to build a model against.
