178: Guta Tolmasquim: Connecting brand to revenue with attribution algorithms that reflect brand complexity

What’s up everyone, today we have the pleasure of sitting down with Guta Tolmasquim, CEO at Purple Metrics.

Summary: Brand measurement often feels like a polite performance nobody fully believes, and Guta learned this firsthand moving from performance marketing spreadsheets to startup rebrands that showed clear sales bumps everyone could feel. She kept seeing blind spots, like a bank’s soccer sponsorship that quietly cut churn or old LinkedIn pages driving conversions no one tracked. When she built Purple Metrics, she refused to pretend algorithms could explain everything, designing tools that encourage gradual shifts over sudden upheaval. She watched CMOs massage attribution settings to fit their instincts and knew real progress demanded something braver: smaller experiments, simpler language, and the courage to say, “We tried, we learned,” even when results stung. Her TikTok videos in Portuguese became proof that brand work can pay off fast if you track it honestly. If you’re tired of clean stories masking messy reality, her perspective feels like a breath of fresh air.

How Brand Measurement Connects to Revenue

Brand measurement drifted away from commercial reality when marketers decided to chase every click and impression. Guta traced this pattern back to the 1970s when companies decided to separate branding and sales into distinct functions. Before that split, teams treated branding as a sales lever that directly supported revenue. The division created two camps that rarely spoke the same language. One camp focused on lavish creative campaigns, and the other became fixated on dashboards filled with shallow metrics.

Guta started her career in performance marketing because she valued seeing every dollar accounted for. She described those years as productive but ultimately unsatisfying. She moved to big enterprises and spent nearly a decade trying to make brand lift reports feel credible in boardrooms. She eventually turned her focus to startups and noticed a clearer path. Startups often have budgets that force prioritization. They pick one initiative, implement it, and measure its direct impact on revenue without dozens of overlapping campaigns.

“When you only have money to do one thing, it becomes obvious what’s working,” Guta explained. “You almost get this A/B test without even planning for it.”

That clarity shaped her view of brand measurement. She learned that disciplined isolation of variables makes results easier to trust. When a startup rebranded, sales moved in a way that confirmed the decision. The data was hard to ignore. Guta saw purchase volumes increase after brand updates, and she knew these signals were stronger than any generic awareness metric. The companies she worked with never relied on sentiment scores alone because they tracked actual transactions.

Guta later built her own product to modernize brand research with a sharper focus on financial outcomes. She designed the system to map brand activities to revenue signals so marketing could prove its impact without resorting to vague reports. The product found traction because it respected the mindset of finance leaders and offered direct evidence that branding drives growth. Guta believed this connection was essential for any team that wants to secure resources and build trust across departments.

Key takeaway: Brand measurement works best when you focus on one clear change at a time and track its impact on revenue without distractions. You can earn credibility with your finance partners by showing how brand decisions move purchase behavior in measurable ways. When you build discipline into measurement and align it with actual sales, you transform branding from a creative exercise into a proven growth lever.

Examples Where Brand Investments Shifted Real Business Outcomes

Brand investments often get treated as trophies that decorate a budget presentation. Guta shared a story that showed how sponsorships can drive specific business results when you track them properly. A Brazilian bank decided to sponsor a soccer championship. On the surface, the campaign looked like a glossy PR move. When Guta’s team measured what they called “mindset metrics,” they found that soccer fans reported higher loyalty toward the bank. The data set off a chain reaction that forced everyone involved to reconsider how they viewed sponsorships.

The bank pulled internal reports and discovered a clear pattern. Fans who followed the soccer sponsorship churned at much lower rates than other customers. Guta said the marketing team realized they were sitting on a revenue engine they never fully understood. They began to see sponsorship as a serious retention tool rather than a vanity spend. That shift did not happen automatically. Someone had to ask whether the big brand push was connected to any measurable outcomes, and then look carefully for the link between sentiment and behavior.

Guta described another client who rebranded their product suite under one name. They planned to delete the old LinkedIn pages that showed the previous brand identities. The team assumed nobody cared about those pages because LinkedIn conversions looked low in standard reports. Guta’s data proved otherwise. Those profiles accounted for more than 10% of conversions. Even though LinkedIn often buries links and limits reach, buyers visited those profiles before searching on Google and converting later.

“Organic is a myth. It’s just conversions you forgot to measure.”

Guta said this with the calm certainty of someone who has studied enough attribution to see where the gaps live. She explained that once you recognize how long it takes for a sponsorship impression to spark a branded search or a sale, you change how you plan. You stop guessing about campaign timing. You start working backward from the conversion window. If you expect a surge in July, you begin your campaigns in May so your budget has time to mature into real conversions instead of wasted impressions.

Key takeaway: Map the path between your brand investments and your conversions with concrete data instead of assumptions. Use mindset metrics to identify early loyalty signals, then confirm whether those signals correlate with retention and branded search. When you see exactly how long each channel takes to drive revenue, you can plan campaigns months in advance and protect your budget with evidence that proves your strategy is working.

The Tangible Outcomes of Brand: Purchase Intent and Memory Structures

Branding often carries a reputation as a soft layer of sentiment layered on top of performance campaigns, but Guta shares that it operates through a more rigorous mechanism than most teams realize. Branding creates memory structures that store signals in a person’s mind. When customers enter the market ready to buy, they retrieve those signals almost instantly. Their brains pull up familiar visuals, a sense of trust, or a specific promise that speeds up the choice. Guta has seen this happen repeatedly when people move straight from awareness to purchase without even visiting the company’s website again.

Guta describes the reality that many marketing teams get stuck in a single-track mindset. They keep trying to hammer home immediate behaviors without any effort to create longer-term recall. She shares that brands can think about their work in two tracks running side by side:

One track plants attributes in memory so customers can recall the brand later.
The other track activates specific behaviors like trying, subscribing, or purchasing.

When companies only focus on activation, they may end up with viral content that does not translate into any buying behavior. Guta has watched teams measure short-term engagement while ignoring whether the campaign ...