Most of what we call “attribution” in marketing and product work is trying to answer the wrong question.
When we see some desirable outcome (more engagement, more conversions, more revenue) we typically try to point to changes made (messages sent, product content delivered) and say *this* caused *that*. The whole notion of A/B testing is built around that logic.
But campaigns and product changes don’t cause outcomes. They’re just vehicles. What actually drives outcomes is alignment: the degree to which the content of the campaign or the shape of the product experience resonates with individual users’ preferences, motivations, and constraints.
Marketing is an alignment problem
Alignment problems are, by definition, individual problems. There’s no such thing as “group alignment.” When a message, offer, or experience drives a large-scale behavior shift, that’s because many individuals happened, at that moment, to share certain preferences that the content aligned with. The causal story is still individual.
This matters because it flips the problem on its head. Instead of asking “Did the campaign work?” or “Did the product change work?”, the better question is: "For whom did this content align well enough to drive action?"
That’s the shift Aampe is built for
Agentic learners don’t fixate on the the vehicle — a message, a feature tweak, a new screen. Instead, it focuses on the underlying value propositions, offers, framings, incentives, and other content choices that align (or fail to align) with individual preferences.
The agent learns, over time, how to better align content with the specific preferences of its assigned user. There are no monolithic campaigns. No broad “product changes” that move the needle for some aggregate cohort. Just millions of individualized decisions about how to populate a message or app screen for a single person, in a single moment.
That’s how alignment scales
Agentic learners don’t fixate on the the vehicle — a message, a feature tweak, a new screen. Instead, it focuses on the underlying value propositions, offers, framings, incentives, and other content choices that align (or fail to align) with individual preferences.
The agent learns, over time, how to better align content with the specific preferences of its assigned user. There are no monolithic campaigns. No broad “product changes” that move the needle for some aggregate cohort. Just millions of individualized decisions about how to populate a message or app screen for a single person, in a single moment.
Attribution is not (or, at least, should not be) a question of campaign vs. product vs. seasonality. The unit of decision isn’t the campaign or the product — it’s the individual moment of alignment with a specific user.
That’s the right unit of analysis.
