Marketing Attribution Is Reframing Operator Governance, Not Just Spend Allocation
- Kevin Jones
- 2 days ago
- 7 min read
As acquisition costs rise, platform media prices inflate, and regulators scrutinise promotional efficiency, this interview examines how attribution analytics is shifting from a marketing metric into a financial and compliance control mechanism.
Under rising media inflation, tightening promotional rules, and sustained margin compression, operators are finding that marketing measurement directly influences budgeting discipline, affiliate payouts, and risk exposure rather than campaign optimisation alone.
In this interview, Tim Mathews, CEO of Immensity.AI, describes how reliance on last-click attribution and siloed channel reporting is misallocating budget, overstating affiliate impact, and masking declining user quality. The discussion signals a structural shift in operating models: attribution data is moving from a growth dashboard into a cross-department decision input shaping finance forecasts, compliance reporting, and retention planning. Rather than expanding tooling, the emphasis is on consolidating intelligence so acquisition source data informs downstream projections of churn, lifetime value, and regulatory risk. The operational implication is clear — marketing analytics is becoming an internal governance layer that determines where capital is deployed, which partners are incentivised, and how performance is defended at board and audit level.
Gaming Eminence: What invisible biases or blind spots in current iGaming marketing analytics did your team uncover first-hand that made you decide the industry needed an AI-driven attribution platform and how does Immensity’s approach explicitly correct for those blind spots?
Tim Mathews: "One of the biggest issues we ran into early on was seeing smart teams make disciplined decisions with incomplete visibility into how demand was actually being generated.
A lot of that comes from how heavily the industry still relies on last-click attribution to guide spend. It is simple and easy to explain internally, but it creates a distorted view of how demand really forms over time.
Each ad platform only sees the conversion event it captures. It has no visibility into what happened before that moment. It does not see the awareness, engagement, or consideration touchpoints that helped push a user toward converting. Because of that, every platform assumes full credit and optimizes as if it is operating in a vacuum.
What operators think is happening: the channel showing the last click is driving demand.
What is actually happening: that channel is often capturing demand that was created earlier by other marketing activities.
Over time, this pushes teams to overweight lower-funnel tactics while underinvesting in the activity that makes those conversions possible in the first place. Short-term metrics can look strong, but efficiency quietly degrades and growth becomes harder to sustain.
We also see a blind spot in how saturation is traditionally understood. Most platforms define saturation as the point where they can no longer spend more budget because the addressable audience is exhausted. That tells you how much money the platform can take, not whether additional spend is still having a meaningful impact for the operator. We look at saturation through downstream metrics, where waste begins when incremental spend stops improving conversion quality, retention, or revenue, even if the platform itself still appears scalable.
At a broader level, this all points to the same issue. Most operators do not have a way to model their marketing as a system. Performance ads, awareness campaigns, affiliates, sponsorships, offline media, promotions, they are all analysed in silos. Immensity was built to bring those pieces together and turn that understanding into actionable guidance."
Gaming Eminence: You previously built attribution models in non-gaming verticals (e.g., music streaming). What specific behavioural or data patterns from those domains did you find transfer to iGaming, and which patterns failed or needed to be redesigned entirely for gaming?
TM: "One of the biggest challenges we had to solve in music was measuring the impact of marketing that does not look like performance marketing. Things like album releases, major media appearances, or platform promotions rarely have a clear conversion signal, but they can absolutely influence how people respond to other marketing running in parallel.
That lesson transferred very directly into gaming. Operators spend heavily on sponsorships, brand campaigns, billboards, affiliate pushes, and major promotions. A lot of the time, teams are left with very little confidence in whether those efforts did anything at all. The challenge is not just proving that they work in isolation, but understanding how and when they influence other parts of the funnel, and under what conditions they actually matter.
We also carried over a lot of thinking around parameters like adstock, saturation, and time-varying effects. Most analytics tools do not account for the fact that marketing does not work in a straight line. The impact of marketing spend is rarely immediate and often unfolds over time across different platforms. Returns diminish as spend increases, messaging effectiveness decays, and user responsiveness changes based on market conditions. In gaming especially, ignoring those dynamics can quickly lead to overspending and deteriorating unit economics if they are not addressed proactively.
Where we had to rethink things more substantially was affiliate modeling. Affiliates exist in music, but the scale and sophistication of affiliate ecosystems in iGaming are very different. Affiliate spend is now a meaningful part of most operators’ acquisition mix, yet there is still limited visibility into incrementality. In simple terms, incrementality asks whether conversions would still occur if a given affiliate or channel were removed. That pushed us to focus more on cohort-level impact rather than basic budget shifts. Often the right move is not spending more or less, but changing how affiliates are incentivised and which partners are rewarded."
Gaming Eminence: Many operators struggle to quantify incrementality in acquisition beyond last click or simplistic multi-touch models. Can you walk us through a real example where Immensity shifted a major budget decision, and what the financial impact looked like over subsequent months?
TM: "While regulated gaming examples are still early, two public case studies from adjacent verticals illustrate the type of budget decisions Immensity enables.
In one case, Immensity worked with Digital River Media and The Cleveland Orchestra to understand which marketing efforts were actually contributing incremental ticket sales. By modeling marketing activity alongside ticket sales and engagement, spend was reallocated toward higher-impact strategies ahead of the season. This contributed to the fastest one million dollars in sales in Blossom Music Center history, record seasonal revenue, and avoided an estimated one hundred thousand dollars in unnecessary spend by focusing efforts where they mattered most.
In another case, Immensity partnered with Hyperculture Media on the album release campaign for We Came As Romans. By modeling daily ad spend across six platforms against streaming behavior, we identified that TikTok and YouTube were driving a disproportionate share of incremental lift despite representing a smaller share of total spend. Based on this, Twitter ads were shut off, roughly twenty-five percent of Meta spend was reallocated, and investment in TikTok was increased materially. Following these changes, the band surpassed two million monthly Spotify listeners for the first time and delivered their most successful release to date.
While these examples come from music and live entertainment, the decision mechanics translate directly to iGaming. Operators often spread budget across channels without knowing which ones are actually driving incremental demand. The value here was not just improved outcomes, but the confidence to make asymmetric budget shifts based on measured impact rather than assumptions."
Gaming Eminence: Immensity recently brought gaming veteran Ramiro Atucha onboard as an advisor to tailor go-to-market and product fit for regulated markets. What was the single biggest piece of operator feedback that changed your roadmap, and how has product strategy evolved as a result?
TM: "We have been incredibly fortunate to have Ramiro join us as an advisor. His experience in gaming brought an immediate grounding effect to how we think about both product design and go-to-market.
One of the biggest takeaways from working with him has been the importance of education before acceleration. Drawing from his experience at Vibra and Leander, Ramiro understands that in regulated markets especially, operators need to clearly understand why a problem exists and how current approaches fall short before they are ready to adopt something new. He helped us internalise how change actually happens inside gaming organisations, where decisions are cross-functional, risk-aware, and often slow to move without internal alignment.
That perspective has shaped our process in very concrete ways. It influenced how we structure onboarding, how we frame insights for different stakeholders, and how we help internal champions communicate value across marketing, finance, and compliance. Rather than pushing adoption too early, we have become much more deliberate about building clarity and trust first, which has materially shaped our roadmap moving into 2026."
Gaming Eminence: Looking ahead 18–24 months, where do you see the next frontier of operator intelligence going beyond attribution? Is there a future for Immensity in predicting player value, anticipating churn before it happens, or even integrating with risk/compliance signals to optimise spend?
TM: "We do not think the future is about adding as many AI tools as possible. Operators are already overwhelmed. What people actually want is intelligence that fits naturally into how they already work and improves the decisions they are already responsible for making. They also want that intelligence to work cross-functionally, not just within marketing, but in how teams communicate results internally.
At Immensity, attribution intelligence is foundational, but it is not the endpoint. Once you understand how users are acquired and which channels are truly incremental, that insight becomes a powerful input into predicting downstream outcomes like player value and churn. If certain acquisition strategies consistently produce higher-quality users under specific conditions, you can begin to anticipate retention risk earlier and adjust spend before those issues show up in lagging metrics.
We also see a clear future in integrating risk and compliance signals into these decisions. Optimizing purely for short-term marketing efficiency without accounting for regulatory exposure or player risk creates hidden costs that tend to surface later. By bringing those signals into the same intelligence layer, operators can make more balanced decisions that account for growth, profitability, and long-term sustainability at the same time.
Longer term, our goal is to help operators connect acquisition, retention, risk, and profitability into a single intelligence loop. Less reactive reporting, more confident decision-making."
