What do you believe? Analytics and attribution in advertising are similar to religion. You have to believe in one approach based on the result of how it makes you feel, and you stick with it for a long time. Maybe somewhere along the way you make a switch, but not without much consternation and debate. For an attribution model to work, you have to have faith.

Imagine you've just been introduced into a new social situation. Your brain immediately starts creating a social hierarchy. That's what we do. We try to identify the power players. The process by which we do this is interesting. The first thing we do is look for obvious cues. In a new job, that would be titles and positions. It's interesting that the cues we use to assign standings are context-dependent. They can also change over time. What's more, they can vary from person to person or generation to generation. In other words, like most things, our understanding of social hierarchy …