“Most companies die in marketing or fail in marketing because they get too caught up on attribution. They get too caught up on seeing immediate results. … It took me three or four months to really start seeing great results from this plan. It took maybe seven to nine months before we had a big deal close and say, we found you because of your TikTok. … You will never get to the levels we have, the views that we get, without being prepared to maybe not have ROI for a couple months.”
The Marketing Millennials · October 2026
Context
Asked for the marketing hill he would die on, Cunningham says brands that demand immediate, last-click attribution lose to brands willing to wait, and backs it with the timeline of ClickUp's own social push.
Transcript
Exactly. That's a good way of saying it.
I want to ask you a question that I ask everybody in this podcast: what is a marketing hill you would die on?
A marketing hill that I would die on is that most companies die in marketing or fail in marketing because they get too caught up on like attribution. They get too caught up on seeing immediate results. You always lose to companies like us who don't do that in marketing because it takes time to see some of these results. And it's not to like make marketers lazy or anything. They should still be held accountable. They should still definitely be bringing in revenue. But those who are too afraid to try anything, those who are just going to follow the same playbook, those who will just do something that brings them immediate ROI, like Facebook ads, they'll only give it so far. Because I told you, it took me three or four months to really start even seeing great results from this plan. It took me maybe seven to nine months before we had a big deal close and say, hey, we found you because of your TikTok, right? But it still happened. And there's still many more that it's happening that we probably don't even know about. But it took, you know, almost a year before we started becoming the brand that everyone's talking about. Oh, Clickup is the gold standard for content. I only got there by breaking this so-called rule of like we need X amount of leads, X amount of…
And you said it, you said at the beginning, I think we're just reiterated that you started off with a very small budget and the budgets kept growing as you started proving results. And that's why it's working. But you had this test budget to do an experiment and then show that. And I'm in agreement…
yeah. Clickup's pretty easy to find. Just at ClickUp. You can find any of the other pages, ClickUp Comedy. If you haven't seen any of our videos, I'm biased, but you should check it out. I think we're definitely doing something different and we're doing something fun. For me, I'm just at…
Yeah. And I think that's the key of winning is adding something to someone's day or adding someone to someone's job or adding something that can make someone better. So I think go out today and with your brand, do something to make someone better. Their job smile. Do something that someone will do.…
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