Vendor Blame-Shifting

Vendor blame-shifting is the failure mode in multi-vendor marketing stacks where each provider attributes underperformance to another's domain — the ads agency blames the landing pages, the web team blames traffic quality, the SEO consultant blames the algorithm — and accountability dissolves because every claim is individually plausible and no party can see the full funnel. It is a structural problem, not a character one: each vendor genuinely only observes their own layer. The tell is a performance problem that survives more than a quarter of cross-vendor debate without a controlled test isolating the true cause. The fix is either a single party accountable for funnel-wide measurement or an internal owner who runs isolation tests (creative holdouts, landing page A/Bs, cohort analysis) and arbitrates on evidence.