Bad Data, Dark Data, & Why Your North Star Keeps Moving

"We built an entire industry on the promise of precise measurement, and most of us don't actually trust the numbers." — JuanMarketing technology promised precision, but the reality is far messier. In practice, only 3% of CMOs can reliably demonstrate ROI on more than half their total marketing spend. In this Office Hours episode, Jacqueline and Juan unpack the measurement and attribution crisis plaguing enterprise marketing teams. From data fragmentation and siloed dashboards to leadership instability and organizational misalignment, the conversation covers why the ROI gap persists, and what to actually do about it.They go deeper than dashboards, introducing the concept of an "epistemological crisis" in analytics: when teams can't agree on what's true, the entire measurement stack collapses.But it’s not all doom and gloom. Jacqueline and Juan break down practical ways forward from fixing taxonomy and defining a measurement tree to embracing uncertainty and speaking the CFO’s language. Better decisions, not perfect data, should be the goal.Timestamps00:20 — Martech World Forum recap, data releases, and renewal horror stories04:34 — The uncomfortable truth about ROI and attribution gaps07:08 — The “epistemological crisis” and why marketers don’t trust data13:32 — Leadership churn, siloed teams, and broken measurement24:27 — Fixing the foundation: taxonomy, definitions, and data hygiene28:11 — Measurement trees, North Star metrics, and the case for measuring less33:57 — Speaking the CFO’s language: customer margin and commercial impactSponsorBrought to you by Hightouch, the leading composable CDP and decisioning platform trusted by brands like Domino's, Chime, and Aritzia. 90% of customers have a real use case live within their first week, delivering world-class personalization at scale. Learn more at hightouch.com/msom.Connect & SubscribeSubscribe to Making Sense of Martech wherever you get your podcasts. Follow us on TikTok, LinkedIn, and don't forget to like and subscribe on YouTube.