Marketing measurement is utterly dysfunctional

Marketing measurement is utterly dysfunctional. It’s fragmented across a dozen tools, disconnected from revenue, and trusted by almost nobody who signs off on the budget.

More than a century ago, John Wanamaker is supposed to have said that half his advertising money was wasted, and “the trouble is I don’t know which half.” Brands now spend fortunes on tools built to answer that question. Most still can’t.

Rory Sutherland put his finger on why. We’ve become “richer and richer on data and poorer and poorer on meaning.” ^[1]

How much of their measurement do brands actually use?

About a third. In 2023, Gartner found marketers were using just 33% of the capabilities in their martech stack, down from 58% in 2020. ^[2]

The problem isn’t laziness. The stack was never built to fit together. A typical challenger brand pays for performance reporting, multi-touch attribution, MMM once or twice a year, brand lift studies, NPS, a brand tracker, social listening, web analytics and a testing program. Then it builds a monthly deck to report on the reports.

Each tool answers a real question. They answer different questions, in different currencies, on different clocks.

None of them was designed to talk to the others. None of them, on its own, tells you what’s moving sales and why.

Why doesn’t more data mean more clarity?

Because nobody owns the join.

Attribution never agrees with the platforms. Awareness goes up while sales stay flat, and nobody can say why. A dozen sources get squeezed into one slide for the CEO. At most challenger brands, that work lands on a marketing team with no data science function, doing analytics in the hours left over from doing marketing.

The output describes what happened and says almost nothing about what to do next. And because every tool tells a slightly different story, the CFO trusts none of them. You pay for the data and still decide on instinct.

What does it cost?

Budget, influence and, eventually, the job.

Gartner calls it the brand doom loop. Companies skimp on brand measurement, stop trusting what it tells them, and so win even less funding the next time around. 84% of companies are caught in it, and they’re half as likely to exceed their growth targets as companies that can value their brand. ^[3] Gartner also predicts that by 2027, over 40% of CMOs who push for bigger brand budgets will lose influence in the C-suite, because they won’t be able to show the returns. ^[4]

Average CMO tenure at S&P 500 companies is 4.1 years, against five for the C-suite as a whole. At consumer companies it’s 3.5 years, the shortest of any sector. ^[5] Measurement isn’t the only reason. But a CMO who can’t show what marketing returns walks into every budget meeting on the back foot.

Why do challenger brands pay the most?

Because they can’t paper over it.

Enterprise brands throw people at the problem: analytics teams to stitch the sources together, econometricians on call, budget to run every study twice. Even they struggle. Most respondents to Gartner’s 2026 CMO Spend Survey work at companies with more than $1 billion in revenue, and 56% still say they don’t have the budget to deliver their strategy. ^[6]

A challenger brand has none of that cover. Less room for a wrong call, less time to wait for an answer, and the same CFO asking the same questions. Challenger brands don’t lose because their marketing is worse. They lose because they can’t see clearly enough, quickly enough.

Is more data the answer?

No. Most brands are already swimming in it. The problem is access: getting from the signals a brand already generates to what’s happening, what it means and what to do next, while the answer still matters.

Certainty isn’t the answer either. Les Binet has called the promise of certainty in measurement “snake oil.” ^[7] Marketing is probabilistic. Anyone promising certainty is selling something.

What’s missing is translation. In Binet’s words: “We need to start talking the language of finance.” ^[8] Brand evidence the CFO can read, in the currency the CFO already uses.

What does measurement that works look like?

Five things.

• Behavioral. Built from what people do (search, visit, view, mention, buy), not what they tell a survey.
• Always-on. There when the decision is, not a quarter later.
• Competitive. A like-for-like view of the brands fighting for the same shopper.
• Connected to revenue. In the CFO’s currency.
• Actionable. An answer, not another chart.

That’s Maitrics. The Brand Momentum Index (patent pending) measures all marketing activity across Paid, Owned, Earned and Search, including LLM visibility, in near-time, against your direct competitors. It needs no first-party data, so there’s nothing for your team to feed it. Eva, your always-on analyst, answers questions in plain language, in the same shape every time: what’s happening, what it means, what to do next.

It connects brand signals to revenue, for the very first time.

It isn’t another brick in the wall. Alongside the tools you already have, it’s not only the connective layer, but the strategic companion you need to make decisions fast and confidently.

What should you do next?

• Audit the wall. List every measurement tool you pay for, the question it answers and how late the answer arrives.
• Count the hours. Measure how much of your team’s month goes on reconciling rather than deciding.
• Cut what doesn’t change decisions. For each report, name one decision it changed last quarter. No decision, no budget.
• Start from the CFO’s question. “What is our marketing doing for revenue?” If nothing you own can answer it, against your competitors, in time to act, you’ve found the problem.

We founded Maitrics to end the dysfunction.

Sources

1. Rory Sutherland, interview at the IAA Global Conference, iQads: iqads.ro
2. Gartner 2023 Marketing Technology Survey, as reported by Communications Today: communicationstoday.co.in
3. Gartner press release, June 10, 2026, “Gartner Marketing Survey Finds 84% of Companies Are Stuck in a ‘Brand Doom Loop’”: gartner.com
4. Gartner, February 2026, “Gartner Predicts Over 40% of CMOs Who Push for Larger Brand Budgets Will Lose Influence With the C-Suite”, as reposted by Clover Infotech: cloverinfotech.com
5. Spencer Stuart CMO tenure analysis, as reported by Marketing Week, November 2025: marketingweek.com
6. Gartner press release, May 11, 2026, 2026 CMO Spend Survey: gartner.com
7. Les Binet, interview with Justin Lebbon, TVREV: tvrev.com
8. Les Binet, interview with Ocean Outdoor, January 2024: oceanoutdoor.com