Marketers are addicted to bad data
This is something I worked on for a couple years, and I fundamentally agree. I started a company around marketing analytics, eventually selling it and integrating it with another marketing analytics company.Our product was B2B revenue attribution: for each dollar spent on marketing, how much revenue came of it? This is hard in B2B, because marketing happens to people, but purchase happen months or years later by companies.We found that we could do this for several data streams (conferences, online ads, gated or cookied content marketing). What we then found is that _CMOs don't care_. We were asked multiple times to widen the definition. To push up the numbers, justifying more ad spend or a bigger user conference or more headcount.And you know what? I think that's OK. Marketing works, and it's a critical component of any company. A lot of good marketing isn't trackable, because it plants a seed inside a person's head far before that person buys anything. It tells a compelling story. The world is full of data-addicted PMs and sales VPs and ad purchasers and CEOs, but good marketing is more than that.If the marketers have to appear (or actually be) addicted to data to communicate well with the rest of their company, then so be it. Just like Jacques says: I don't know what the way out of this mess is, or what the path to success looks like. Good marketing can still happen with bad data.