2. “[They] were so preoccupied by whether or not they could, they didn’t stop to think if they should” - Dr. Ian Malcolm, Jurassic Park.

Part of the issue with marketing in the digital age is that there are so many data points. And it can be oh so tempting to make things KPIs just because they are available, free and unimpeachably accurate.

But just because we can track something, doesn’t necessarily follow that it’s an indicator of what we want to measure.

Click-through rates are a classic example for programmatic campaigns. So often have I sat in a PCA session where people will enthusiastically whoop and holler at a 0.8% click-through rate, citing double digit percentage increase on the same number the previous year.

But nobody ever stops to ask the obvious question: “When was the last time anyone ever intentionally clicked on a programmatic banner?”.

Such metrics are tempting because they are so easy to manipulate. And being able to stand in front of the board at the end of the year and point to lots of numbers heading apparently the “right” way is sometimes of existential importance for a marketer’s role.

But at the end of the day, we all owe it to ourselves, and to the brands we represent, to strive for the metrics that matter.