Marketers have no shortage of metrics on their dashboards, but they are still often flying blind. Marketing visibility can be simultaneously clear and opaque. To paraphrase Coleridge, the state of marketing is “metrics, metrics everywhere, and not sure what to think.”

OverstateGate brought a colorful rise out of Branding Professor Mark Ritson:

“This little debacle once again confirms that nobody actually knows what the fuck is going on with digital media. Not media agencies, not big-spending clients and not armchair digital strategists. From the shadowy box of turds and spiders that is programmatic to the increasingly complex and deluded world of digital views, the idea that digital marketing is more analytical and attributable than other media is clearly horse shit. Sure, it has more numbers and many more metrics but that does not make it more accountable, it makes it less so.”

In general, marketers can’t always take metrics at face value. We have to get savvier and more sophisticated at questioning the numbers we use. We have to beware of faux metrics and fuzzy math....

Via Jeff Domansky, Os Ishmael