Most marketing executives obsess over conversion rates. Taylor Thomson thinks that obsession is killing their brands.
“I think the thing that everybody should stop doing is have marketing be sales. They’re not,” Thomson says. He leads finance at WITHIN, a performance branding agency working with clients like Nike, but his most radical ideas concern what marketing should actually do.
His answer: give everything away for free.
“Have marketing be marketing, have marketing drive thought leadership and drive ideas and drive content and really be information,” Thomson argues. “Free information online.”
This runs counter to the B2B playbook that has dominated for a decade. Taylor believes the future belongs to companies willing to provide value without demanding conversion.
The Performance Trap
Thomson’s perspective comes from an unusual vantage point. WITHIN specializes in “performance branding,” combining the emotional connection of brand marketing with measurable outcomes.
“Performance marketing would be your traditional performance driven KPI. ROAS or CPA or what we really love is LTV,” Thomson explains. “Brand marketing is building that emotional connection with your consumer.”
Most companies separate these completely. Different teams, different budgets, different metrics. Performance marketing optimizes for immediate results. Brand marketing builds equity that’s hard to measure.
The trouble starts when performance thinking dominates. Companies gate all valuable content. They optimize every page for conversion. Marketing becomes indistinguishable from sales.
Thomson calls this the “sales funnel trap.”
Free Value at Scale
WITHIN demonstrates Thomson’s philosophy through the Marketing Pulse. The platform provides real-time industry trends including CPM data, revenue metrics from social channels, and cost information across major platforms.
Anyone can access it. No registration. No email capture. No follow-up sequences.
“We give it out, we don’t need anything from it,” Thomson says. “You don’t have to enter the sales funnel, you don’t have to become one of the little leads in Salesforce.”
This approach seems financially reckless. How do you justify the investment? How do you measure return?
Thomson’s answer: you can’t measure it, and trying to will ruin it.
“You have to buy in to knowing that you are not going to see ROI. You are never going to get measurable ROI from it. It’s impossible. There’s too many touchpoints.”
Why Attribution Doesn’t Work
The modern marketing department runs on attribution models. First touch, last touch, multi-touch. Entire platforms exist to help companies understand which touchpoint deserves credit for a conversion.
Thomson thinks this framework is fundamentally broken.
“If you figure out the attribution question wholly, you’re good,” he says. But perfect attribution isn’t possible with complex B2B sales involving dozens of interactions across months.
The pursuit of attribution creates perverse incentives. Companies optimize for what they can measure rather than what matters. Email open rates become more important than trust. Form fills matter more than reputation.
When WITHIN launched the Marketing Pulse, they had no way to track which prospects eventually became clients because they’d used the tool. The value was real. The attribution was impossible.
The 2026 Advantage
Several forces make Thomson’s approach particularly relevant for 2026.
Audiences have reached peak exhaustion with aggressive marketing. Every website demands personal information. Companies that break this pattern will stand out simply by being generous.
Privacy regulations and browser changes are dismantling traditional tracking. Third-party cookies are disappearing. The measurement-obsessed playbook that worked in 2016 won’t survive 2026.
B2B buying cycles keep getting longer. Thomson’s experience shows WITHIN’s best clients came through organic referrals and word-of-mouth, not optimized funnels.
The Implementation Challenge
Thomson acknowledges his approach requires courage most marketing departments don’t have.
Leadership wants metrics. Sales demands leads. Finance needs to justify budget. The pressure for measurable ROI is constant.
“That’s a hard pill to swallow,” Thomson admits. “You’re going to invest money right now and you’re not going to see anything on it for nine months. You might not actually ever see a direct one-to-one correlation to your revenue.”
The temptation to compromise is equally constant. Six months in, someone suggests adding a simple email form.
“I know we said we weren’t going to use this as an explicit sales tool, but hey, I know these guys were on the site and they looked at the content, so I’m going to pepper them with sales emails,” Thomson describes the rationalization.
Once you add that first gate, the strategy unravels.
What Success Actually Looks Like
Thomson’s professional network demonstrates what happens when companies commit to this approach. WITHIN grew through client referrals and word-of-mouth for years before building formal business development systems.
That organic growth came from reputation. The company became known for providing value in both paid client work and free resources. That reputation created compounding returns that no amount of conversion optimization could match.
Businesses that will thrive in 2026 will follow a similar path. They’ll provide genuine value without strings attached. They’ll build trust through generous information sharing. They’ll resist the constant pressure to optimize every interaction for immediate conversion.
The strategy is simple: help people without asking for anything in return. Give away your best insights. Share your expertise freely. Trust that value provided creates value returned, even when you can never prove it in a spreadsheet.
That’s Thomson’s bet for 2026. Companies willing to make it will discover that the hardest metric to measure might be the most valuable asset they can build.
Trust doesn’t show up in attribution reports. But it shows up everywhere else.
