# Misguided Marketing Analytics By:: [[Brian Heath]] 2023-03-23 Marketing Analytics is all the rage these days. When searching for a role in Analytics, most openings you'll see will be related to marketing. This is partly because marketing activities are now measured via digital fingerprints we leave all over the internet. With all this weirdly imprecise data, many organizations have turned to analytics professionals to make sense of it. You might think that with many analytics professionals turning to marketing that things would have gotten easier, faster, and better. However, exploring the digital marketing analytics landscape will quickly reveal a mess of systems, incomplete data, and incoherent strategies. I suspect that eventually, someone will figure out how to do it better, but only after marketing and analytics synthesizes into something new that is meaningful. Today Marketing Analytics is a blend of paradigms akin to retrofitting a 1950s car with an electric engine. Can it work? Sure. Is it efficient and game-changing? No. It is a short-term consulting hack and a knee-jerk response to an existential marketing crisis. In the age when organizations want to measure everything, marketing struggles because it is about capturing attention and changing hearts. We struggle to measure these things, but along came the internet. Now organizations believe that clicks must be attention and change. While some connections exist here, it hardly moves mountains to the point that "successful" marketing campaigns are measured in tenths of percentage points. Analysts can piece together all the data clicks in the world and conduct endless A/B testing, but it doesn't matter if the marketing message and product are not worthy of attention and change. A better strategy is to understand the human condition and human behaviors. If you figure this out, you can develop methods and plans to assess the impact, progress, and evolution of your marketing. Any hack can create and measure clickbait and move on before being found out. Understanding humanity will unlock the next generation of marketing that synthesizes the old and the new. #### Related Items [[Marketing]] [[Analytics]] [[The Human Condition]] [[Paradigms]] [[Metamodernism]] [[Data]]