A few weeks ago, I had dinner with a friend. A marketing director, more than twenty years in the field. We ended up on a topic that haunts us both: constant information overload. Data from everywhere, reports, dashboards, platforms, communications. And yet, still that feeling of not knowing the right things.
Somewhere in the middle of dinner, I floated an idea: what if there were a tool that automatically checked that data regularly, compared it against benchmarks, and just gave me the result? No downloads. No Excel. Just an answer.
My friend added without hesitation: “Ideally like a podcast. Fifteen minutes in the car in the morning, and I know where I stand.” We both went quiet for a moment, wondering why this doesn't exist yet.
We spend hours trying to know what's going on. And we still don't find out in time.
Look at your week. How much time do you spend in Google Analytics, Meta Business Suite, LinkedIn Campaign Manager, a CRM dashboard, an Excel file someone threw together as a temporary fix and nobody's touched since? How many reports land in your inbox every week, and how many do you actually read?
Sources:
- MarketingProfs / Ascend2, 2023
- CMO Survey, Duke University
- Gartner Marketing Analytics Survey 2024
We spend hours producing reports nobody reads. Decisions that are supposed to be data-driven end up, to a large extent, just as intuitive as ever. This isn't a failure of the people involved — it's a failure of the system we built for ourselves.
How did we get here?
Over the past decade, marketing has splintered into hundreds of pieces. In 2024, Chiefmartec counted more than 14,000 tools. A mid-sized company typically uses dozens of them in practice, each with a different dashboard and a different logic.
The CMO Survey finds that nearly half of purchased marketing technology tools never actually get used in practice. The company pays for them, and no one ever opens them. There's no time, no capacity, and no clarity on what anyone would even be looking for there.
My friend's idea wasn't really about a product. It was a wish for something normal: to know in the morning what every good manager knows — what's on fire, what can wait, and what can safely be ignored.
The real question isn't “when will this new solution exist”
It's: what do we do in the meantime?
The problem isn't that we don't have enough data. We have too much. The tools exist. The problem is how a marketer decides what actually matters among it all.
Gartner says that better data alone won't increase analytics' actual influence. The real obstacle is cognitive bias, and the absence of a culture that treats data as evidence and a primary basis for decisions, rather than as decoration. First, we need to answer the question of why we want the data. Only then does it make sense to figure out how and where to get it.
The CMO of the future isn't the one who can work the best tool. It's the one who knows which questions they want answered.
So what do you do? Three things you can do this week
1. Write down your 5–7 questions. Not what you currently track, but what you genuinely need to know to make good decisions. Most marketers find the list is surprisingly short, and that most of what's on it is currently scattered across ten different places, or not visible at all.
2. Show that list to the people who produce the reports. Ask them: are we producing this — what's on this list? This conversation tends to be uncomfortable. It also tends to be very useful.
3. Flag what could be automated. Don't start with a big project. One automated report, one notification, one number in your inbox every Monday. That's enough as a first step.
Data-driven marketing is still a fairy tale, for now
We say we run data-driven marketing. And yet a quarter of decision-makers never even open their reports. Two-thirds of decisions rest on intuition. More than half of the tools we've paid for go actively unused.
Until we admit that to ourselves, we'll keep buying dashboards instead of building the capacity to actually work with them.
That's the change that has to happen first.