Episode Details

What’s up everyone, today we have the pleasure of sitting down with Kacie Jenkins, SVP Marketing at Sendoso.

Summary: Marketing isn’t about cramming creativity into a spreadsheet, and Kacie’s journey proves it. She took on last-touch attribution, broke free from narrow metrics, and built a system that told the whole story, one where sales and marketing actually worked together. It wasn’t flashy; it was months of unsexy foundational work that led to record-breaking results. Kacie’s advice is to stop obsessing over proving your worth with perfect data. Focus on collaboration, long-term strategies, and building something so good it proves itself.

About Kacie

• Kacie started her career as a recording artist for 6 years where she recorded and released 2 top 30’s singles on country radio
• She transitioned to FANDOM as Marketing Manager where she helped build and scale entertainment and gaming communities
• She then shifted to consumer tech and worked at Roku where she helped take their streaming stick to market
• She later joined Fastly when they were still a tiny startup and was eventually promoted to VP of Marketing while helping them scale to $200M in ARR and a massive IPO
• She moved on to a few other VP of marketing stints at Ace Hotel and then Sourcegraph
• Today Kacie is Senior Vice President of Marketing at Sendoso, the top gifting and direct mail platform for revenue teams

Why Marketing Needs to Break Free from Last Touch Attribution

Kacie has strong opinions about last touch attribution and its role in marketing, calling it both misguided and overused. She recounts a memorable example where a company’s finance team mandated that every marketing touchpoint be unique, forbidding multiple efforts for a single account. The result was a fragmented strategy, with marketing forced to isolate efforts rather than integrate them—a scenario she describes as fundamentally broken. This, she says, reflects a wider misunderstanding of marketing’s role in driving success.

In her experience, marketing is often held to an unrealistic standard that no other department faces. “No one questions whether a sales team should exist,” Kacie points out, yet marketers are repeatedly asked to prove their value in isolation. This obsession with single-point attribution—whether first or last touch—reduces complex buyer journeys to simplistic, unrealistic models. She likens it to sports, where success is measured by the contributions of the entire team, not just the final goal or play. In marketing, the same principle applies: campaigns succeed when brand, product, sales, and customer experience work cohesively.

Kacie highlights how marketers often agree to flawed measurement practices under intense job pressure. Many leaders, she notes, demand immediate, trackable results and dismiss longer-term investments like brand building. When these short-sighted strategies fail, the blame lands on the marketing team, perpetuating a destructive cycle. This became especially apparent during the pandemic, when companies slashed budgets for brand and integrated marketing, only to see their performance suffer months later.

At its core, the problem stems from a demand to quantify marketing in ways that are convenient rather than meaningful. Kacie insists that attribution models like last touch can provide insights but have been misused to force marketing into a demand capture role that undervalues its broader impact. Effective marketing, she argues, cannot succeed in a vacuum—it depends on the health and alignment of the entire organization.

Key takeaway: Attribution models like last touch offer insights but become problematic when used in isolation. Marketing thrives on collaboration across teams, long-term investments, and integrated strategies. Simplistic measurement frameworks undermine this by reducing success to isol