The Measurement Conundrum: Why ‘What Gets Measured Gets Managed’ No Longer Means What You Think
There’s an old joke among marketers: “The best thing about the internet is you can measure everything. The worst thing about the internet is you can measure everything.” Today, this quip feels less like a joke and more like a diagnosis for modern marketing’s biggest problem.
But beneath this tension lies a deeper truth: Marketing hasn’t changed, but marketers must. As we navigate today’s complex, multi-channel ecosystem, this axiom feels more relevant than ever.
Coming Full Circle: The Return to Econometrics
In the early days of marketing measurement — before digital attribution dashboards existed — marketers relied on econometrics and marketing mix modeling. These foundational approaches aimed for a holistic view of marketing’s impact across all channels, even if data was scarce and modeling was painstaking.
With digital, attribution seemed to offer an easier, more granular shortcut. But as the marketing ecosystem exploded in complexity, the simplicity attribution promised quickly evaporated. Now, we find ourselves coming full circle—returning to econometrics, but in a vastly more complicated world crowded with channels, formats, and data sources.
This return to fundamentals signals that marketing itself hasn’t changed. What has changed is the role of marketers, who must now master the increasingly challenging art of truly full-funnel measurement.
The Allure (and Limits) of Easy Metrics
In the era of digital advertising, measurement became seductively simple. Cross-channel attribution tools, last-click reports, and dashboard analytics can, at the press of a button, seem to deliver neat answers to messy questions. This ease has led marketers to focus overwhelmingly on easily accessible metrics—often, those that prove incremental efficiency rather than true business growth.
While it’s tempting to optimize toward whatever is visible, this has quietly changed the DNA of how we run marketing. We prioritize what is easy to measure over what truly matters. Performance metrics become proxies for effectiveness, leading brands and agencies to chase the efficiency high of attribution-based measurement—often at the expense of actual marketing impact.
The Full-Funnel Challenge
Yet, real marketing effectiveness is messy, interconnected, and full-funnel. Big brand lifts, marketplace momentum, long-term loyalty, and enduring preference are rarely captured by last-touch dashboards or simplistic ROI calculations. True full-spectrum measurement—such as modern econometrics—requires integrating data across all channels and formats, from TV and out-of-home to search, social, and even word-of-mouth. These models demand clean, structured, and scalable data, a challenge magnified by today’s fragmented and rapidly shifting media landscape.
The explosion of data sources and marketing technology has ironically made the measurement problem harder, not easier. Organizations find themselves overwhelmed by complexity and underprepared to extract clean, actionable data from a tangled ecosystem. The result is an environment where marketers default to measuring what’s readily available—and ignore the rest.
Trapped by the ‘Efficiency Illusion’
Here lies the real trap: Our fixation with efficiency metrics and easily available data locks us into incrementalism. Attribution-based measurement, while useful in narrow contexts, rarely captures the broad, interdependent impact of a true marketing ecosystem. This narrow focus creates a vicious cycle: data availability drives the agenda, further sidelining the harder, more important task of full-funnel measurement.
It’s not so much about laziness as it is about organizational inertia. The real issue is that without the will (and the tools) to tackle the incredibly hard work of building clean, structured, and transparent data across all touchpoints, we risk steering marketing by what’s convenient – not what’s effective.
Breaking the Cycle: Why Marketers Must Adapt
If marketing itself has not changed, then it’s marketers who must evolve to meet the challenge of a sophisticated, data-rich environment. This means:
- Acknowledging that everything has an impact: Even if it can’t be attributed on a dashboard, every channel and touchpoint contributes to overall business results.
- Investing in scalable, cross-channel data infrastructures: Ongoing commitment to data quality, integration, and privacy is essential.
- Championing complexity: Great marketing is rarely simple. Embracing complexity in measurement is the only way to get back to genuine effectiveness.
- Educating and empowering decision-makers: Leadership must understand and commit to measurement strategies that reflect the real world, not just what is easy.
Embracing this full-circle journey—returning to econometrics in a modern, complex world—is the necessary step for marketers ready to reclaim the true power of marketing effectiveness.
Conclusion
The path back to marketing effectiveness is not through obsessing over what is easy to measure, but by tackling the hard, unglamorous work of building full-funnel, clean, and scalable measurement systems. It’s not about labeling marketers as lazy—it’s about breaking out of the efficiency trap and reclaiming marketing’s real business impact.
After all, marketing hasn’t changed, but marketers must. In a world where everything can be measured, the hardest—and most important—thing is choosing what truly matters.
