More than a third of in-house marketers are quietly feeding budget into channels they privately believe are not working. The reason: the dashboard still looks good enough to defend.
That is the headline from Playing defense, Funnel and Ravn Research’s fifth annual study, released October 29, 2026. Based on 233 predominantly in-house marketers and interviews with five agency leaders, it paints a picture of teams choosing provable, safe bets over potentially stronger ones.
The defensive playbook
Across the past two years, respondents admitted to several defensive moves:
- 36% kept paying for a channel they believed did not work because the reported numbers were too favorable to cut.
- 60% chose a safer, more provable strategy over a riskier one they suspected would do better.
- 59% prioritized work because it was easier to measure, not because it was the best option.
- 61% said they had cherry-picked a metric that told a more favorable story.
Separately, 29% admitted staying silent in a meeting when they knew the data was wrong or misleading.
Why pressure pushes budgets sideways
The report frames this as a measurement problem more than a courage problem. 80% of in-house marketers feel at least moderate pressure to justify their value, and 48% of that group say pressure makes them less willing to take risks.
At the same time, customer acquisition costs rose for 56% of respondents, while only 35% saw ROAS increase and 41% said it stayed flat. When the numbers tighten, low-funnel tactics that are easy to attribute become the safe, familiar choice.
“Marketers are afraid of making mistakes. They’re afraid of being blamed if a strategy doesn’t work,” said Natalia Hernandez, managing director of data at Brainlabs.
The measurement gap is stark: only 18% of in-house marketers say they can clearly determine the impact of each channel. 49% still rely primarily on platform-reported data and simple attribution. Just 10% report high trust in their own attribution model.
What to do about it
The report’s clearest contrast is between clear-signal and muddled-signal teams. Among clear-signal teams, only 15% describe their strategy as primarily defensive, versus 52% of muddled-signal teams. That suggests better measurement changes the kind of bets teams are willing to make.
The report also asked what marketers would do with five years of guaranteed job security. 56% said they would invest more in brand-building versus short-term performance; 46% would experiment with channels they currently avoid.
Tallink Silja Line offers a practical example. The cruise company moved away from last-click attribution, which overvalued lower-funnel channels, and adopted marketing mix modeling. Funnel credits the shift with a 50% improvement in return on ad spend and a 26% increase in paid digital revenue while digital spend fell 16%.
The takeaway for growth teams: treat the budget line that looks too good to cut as a signal to dig deeper, not a reason to keep funding it. An incrementality test or a tougher measurement review may be the cheapest way to stop paying for doubt.
Source: PPC Land
