S 01 | Ep 10 Turning Your Marketing Into Dollars Peter Fader is a Wharton marketing professor , co - inventor of modern customer lifetime value modeling , and founder of Zodiac , which was acquired by Nike . He is also one of RELAYTO ' s earliest backers , which gives this conversation an unusual level of candor . The episode covers a lot of ground but keeps returning to one central argument : not all customers are created equal , and companies that treat them as if they are will waste money acquiring the wrong ones , misread their own growth , and eventually run out of runway . Peter ' s work gives marketers the quantitative tools to make that case internally , particularly to Finance , which is where he believes marketing credibility is won or lost . He also takes aim at a few persistent bad habits . The tendency to let technology lead strategy rather than the other way around . Attribution models built on incomplete touch points that tell a convincing but inaccurate story . The organizational disconnect between teams that acquire customers and teams that serve them , which he sees as one of the most expensive structural problems in modern marketing . His framework for the Renaissance CMO is straightforward . Lead with analytics , earn the right to talk about creativity , and make lifetime value a language the whole organization speaks .