Taylor Thomson has spent his career building revenue operations systems at WITHIN, a performance branding agency working with household names like Nike. But his most contrarian belief has nothing to do with dashboards or conversion rates. It's about giving away value without demanding anything in return.

"Have marketing be marketing, have marketing drive thought leadership and drive ideas and drive content and really be information," Thomson argues. "Free information online. The more that marketing can do that, I think the better everybody's going to be at their jobs because it's just information sharing and knowledge sharing."

This philosophy runs counter to nearly every B2B marketing playbook written in the past decade. While competitors gate white papers behind forms and nurture leads through automated sequences, Thomson advocates for radical generosity. Taylor Thomson believes companies waste money on marketing by treating every interaction as a conversion opportunity rather than a relationship-building moment.

Thomson's background gives him unique insight into this tension. He leads finance at WITHIN, where the company's core offering is "performance branding"—the unification of brand marketing and performance marketing into a single, measurable approach.

"Performance marketing would be your traditional performance driven KPI that a business might have—ROAS or CPA or what we really love is LTV," Thomson explains. "Brand marketing is building that emotional connection with your consumer and traditionally those two sides of the house are sort of bifurcated."

Most companies treat these functions as separate departments with different budgets and philosophies. Performance marketing wants immediate, measurable results. Brand marketing builds long-term equity that's difficult to quantify.

The problem emerges when performance marketing thinking dominates. Companies optimize every touchpoint for conversion, measuring success by leads generated, forms filled, emails captured. This creates what Thomson calls the "sales funnel trap."

"I think the thing that everybody should stop doing is have marketing be sales. They're not," Thomson says bluntly.

WITHIN practices what Thomson preaches through a tool called the Marketing Pulse. The platform provides real-time trends across industries—CPM data, revenue driven from different social channels, costs across Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, and YouTube.

"We give it out, we don't need anything from it," Thomson notes. "The more of that that marketing teams can really do, where you don't have to enter the sales funnel, you don't have to become one of the little leads in Salesforce that you're just going to get a bunch of calls and emails about, but just you can get people that information."

No forms. No opt-ins. No tracking pixels following you around the internet. Just useful information, freely shared.

This approach seems risky. How do you measure return on investment? How do you justify marketing spend to leadership?

Thomson's answer: you don't. And that's precisely the point.

"You have to really be willing to let that tail go," he explains. "You have to buy in to knowing that you are not going to see ROI. You are never going to get measurable ROI from it. It's impossible. There's too many touchpoints."

Thomson challenges the fundamental assumption underlying modern marketing: that you can attribute revenue to specific touchpoints and optimize accordingly.

"If you figure out the attribution question wholly, you're good," he says. But attribution at that level isn't possible with complex B2B sales cycles involving dozens of interactions across months or years.

The pursuit of perfect attribution leads companies to optimize for what's measurable rather than what matters. They track email opens and webinar registrations while missing the bigger picture—are we building trust? Are we demonstrating expertise? Are we creating value for our audience?

When WITHIN started offering the Marketing Pulse, they couldn't have predicted which prospects would eventually become clients because of it. The value was real, but the attribution was impossible.

Several trends make Thomson's philosophy particularly relevant for businesses entering 2026.

Audiences are exhausted by aggressive marketing. Every website demands an email address. Every download requires a form fill. The companies that can resist this pressure and provide value without strings attached will stand out dramatically.

Privacy regulations and browser changes are making traditional tracking harder. Third-party cookies are dying. The measurement-obsessed playbook that worked in 2016 won't work in 2026.

Buying cycles are getting longer and more complex. Thomson's experience shows that WITHIN's best clients came from organic referrals and word-of-mouth—relationships built over time, not captured in a single campaign.

Thomson acknowledges this approach requires courage. Leadership wants metrics. Sales wants leads. Finance wants to justify spend.

"That's a hard pill to swallow," Thomson admits. "If your leadership is saying, yeah, you're going to invest a bunch of money right now and you're not going to see anything on it for nine months, especially with things like that, really high value content and things that drive relationships in that way, you might not actually ever see a direct one-to-one correlation to your revenue."

The temptation to backslide is constant. Six months into providing free value, the pressure mounts to add an opt-in form. To gate the content. To capture those email addresses.

"I know we said that we weren't going to use this as an explicit sales tool, but hey, I know these guys were on the site and they looked at the content, so I'm going to pepper them with sales emails," Thomson describes the rationalization. "And it's really hard, I think, to rectify the fact that you've got to buy in and you've really got to double down on that without falling into that trap."

Resisting that temptation requires treating marketing as a long-term investment in brand equity rather than a short-term lead generation engine.

Thomson's professional network reflects the results of this philosophy. WITHIN grew through client referrals and word-of-mouth before building formal business development systems. The company's reputation for providing value created organic growth that paid compounding returns.

The businesses that will thrive in 2026 will follow a similar path: providing genuine value, building trust through generous information sharing, and resisting the pressure to optimize every interaction for immediate conversion.

In an era of aggressive funnels and conversion optimization, the most radical marketing strategy might be the simplest: help people without asking for anything in return. Give away your best insights. Share your expertise freely. Trust that value provided creates value returned, even if you can never prove it in a spreadsheet.

That's Thomson's bet for 2026. The companies willing to make it will discover that the hardest metric to measure—trust—might be the most valuable asset they can build.