[inthewoods]

"Also, as another member pointed out, Airbnb's performance marketing budget is still well over $200M/year, which no responsible/public company would spend if it wasn't returning a great ROAS. Finally, Airbnb is known for all sorts of marketing shenanigans in their early days, and they certainly can't take the credit for a pure brand play."

My experience is exactly the opposite. The larger the budget, the less real hard analysis is done. This is especially true with the rise of attribution modeling which allows marketers to essentially motion blur the data.

[aerosmile]

The larger the budget, the more sophisticated the teams and the methodology. Also, more players eager to accuse marketing of poor performance (eg: sales and revenue teams). Not sure where you made that experience, but that marketing team would get fired within a quarter at any large scale company I am familiar with. Large companies are inefficient in many ways, but not in what pays the bills.

[inthewoods]

Many of the large companies will say "we have a complex sales cycle" (and they often do) and leverage multi-touch attribution models which removes the direct ROI calculation.