Marketing measurement is a competitive moat
Most executives treat measurement like a utility bill. The ones who treat it like edge quietly take the market.
Marketing measurement is the closest thing a brand has to a moat. Most executives treat it like a utility bill, something to minimize and never think about, and it is quietly costing them their market.
How weak buyers give it away
You can see it in how the weak brands buy.
A weak CMO wants measurement off their desk, so they buy the tool that most flatters what they already believe. They are not shopping for truth. They are shopping for a second opinion that agrees with the first.
A weak CFO wants one clean number, fast, to feed a budget, a forecast, and someone's bonus. They take precision over accuracy every time, a confident wrong number over a messy right one, because the confident number is the one that is easy to defend in a board meeting.
None of them are stupid, which is what makes it worse. They are smart people who decided that the one function capable of winning them the market was not worth their attention.
Measurement is edge, the same way it is in finance
Finance understood this decades ago. If you can value a security a little more accurately than everyone else, you take profit out of the gap, over and over, and you call it edge. Marketing is no different. A brand that reads its true marketing ROI even slightly better than its competitors can take a category, especially a crowded and expensive one like gaming, travel, ecommerce, or banking, where everyone is bidding against everyone and nobody has margin to spare.
What it was worth, in points of share
We put a number on this. For an advertiser spending north of 500 million dollars a year, we built a custom market-share model that showed exactly how mismeasurement would play out as they moved into a new market. Undervalue a key channel and you starve the thing that is working. Overvalue one and you pour money into the thing that is not. Either mistake, carried into a competitive market, ended the same way: share walking out the door.
In their case, good versus bad measurement was worth nearly 10 points of share in that market, the difference between being the clear winner and a long-tail competitor. The black-box measurement they had been renting was not just imperfect. It was a house of cards, one rival away from collapse, and it was costing them tens of millions of dollars in ineffective spend.
Measurement is not the cost of doing marketing. It is the edge that decides who takes the market and who quietly loses it.
Own your measurement.
Common questions
Is marketing measurement a competitive advantage?
Yes. A brand that reads its true marketing ROI even slightly more accurately than its competitors compounds that edge, much like an investor who values a security a little better than the market. In crowded, expensive categories it can be worth points of market share.
Why do executives underinvest in measurement?
Many treat it as a cost to minimize. A CMO may buy the tool that flatters existing beliefs; a CFO may prefer one confident number that is easy to defend over a messier but more accurate one. Both optimize for comfort over truth.
How much is accurate measurement actually worth?
In one Growth By Science engagement, for an advertiser spending more than 500 million dollars a year, the gap between good and bad measurement modeled to nearly 10 points of market share in a new market, plus tens of millions in otherwise ineffective spend.