Eimear Colleran.
Eimear Colleran, Head of Marketing, Prophet
Marketing is obsessed with change.
Every year brings a new platform, a new algorithm, a new way to reach consumers. Teams rework strategies, agencies reinvent capabilities, and brands chase whatever the next big shift might be.
But while the industry constantly evolves the way it does marketing, it rarely questions the way it measures it. In fact, one phrase quietly underpins a huge amount of marketing decision-making.
“That’s how we’ve always measured it.”
It sounds harmless. Sensible even. But it is one of the most dangerous ideas in modern marketing. Because while marketing has changed dramatically over the past decade, many of the metrics used to judge it have not.
The metrics we inherited
Much of the industry’s measurement framework was designed for a completely different era. A world where media was more predictable, customer journeys were simpler and the number of signals available to marketers was limited.
Today, the environment looks very different.
Consumers move across dozens of platforms in a single day. Algorithms decide who sees what. Economic shifts can change demand overnight. Yet many organisations are still relying on the same familiar indicators to judge success.
- Last click attribution
- Short-term ROAS
- Channel by channel optimisation
These metrics are not inherently wrong. They just tell a very narrow story. And when that narrow story becomes the main lens through which performance is judged, it starts to shape how marketing behaves.
Measurement doesn’t just report performance. It drives it.
Marketers like to think of measurement as neutral. A way of objectively reporting what happened. In reality, measurement systems influence behaviour far more than we realise.
If teams are judged primarily on short-term returns, they will prioritise short-term activity. If dashboards report channel performance in isolation, marketing will be managed channel by channel. If success is defined by immediate outcomes, longer-term investments become harder to defend.
Not because they do not work. Because the system measuring them cannot properly see them. Over time, this creates an industry that is incredibly good at optimising the present, and much less confident investing in the future.
The dashboard illusion
The irony is that marketers have never had more data.
Every campaign, click, impression and conversion is now visible in real time. Dashboards glow with performance indicators. Reports arrive daily. And yet many marketing leaders privately admit they feel less certain than ever.
More data has not necessarily created more clarity. In many cases, it has simply created more reporting. Most dashboards are designed to answer one question. What happened?
Far fewer help answer the question marketers actually need to solve.
What should we do next?
A shift is quietly underway
Across the industry, a new mindset is beginning to emerge. Instead of simply measuring the past, organisations are starting to simulate the future.
Rather than asking “Which channel performed best last month?” they are asking:
- What happens if we increase brand investment?
- How will the business respond if demand softens?
- What external factors are influencing our results?
This shift moves marketing away from retrospective reporting and towards decision intelligence.
It is less about perfectly explaining the past and more about making smarter decisions about the future.
The question worth asking
Every marketing organisation has metrics that have simply been inherited over time.
They are rarely challenged. Rarely redesigned. Rarely questioned. But the market has changed. Media has changed. Consumer behaviour has changed. Which raises a simple but uncomfortable question.
Are we measuring what matters, or just measuring what we inherited?
Because in modern marketing, the most dangerous phrase is not “we don’t have enough data”. It is the quiet assumption that the data we already have is still the right way to judge success.