Imagine a world where the day executives review marketing dashboards isn’t loaded with anxiety. Where variances from the original plan don’t automatically signal failure — whether that’s a failure to forecast accurately or to tightly control marketing teams, processes and technology. Where the dominant model for managing marketing is something other than a rigid, factory-style system obsessed with control and predictability. Your world can look like this. Business leaders long for certainty. They often wish marketing behaved like a factory line, where demand could be consistently produced on schedule. Yet executives have always been exasperated by how unpredictable marketing is. Persistent volatility ensures that outcomes almost never match the plan exactly. As the military saying goes, “No plan survives contact with the enemy.” Even so, dashboard day still tends to feel like judgment day. You either hit the target, beat it or fell short.
Dig deeper: Why AI is the most unpredictable cost in the martech stack
When marketing automation emerged, many leaders believed it would finally make marketing manageable and forecastable. Unfortunately, the flood of new data mostly confirmed the opposite: marketing remains stubbornly uncertain. The only real constants are that markets are intrinsically unpredictable and the rate of change keeps speeding up. Embracing uncertainty doesn’t let marketing leaders off the hook for planning and measurement. Instead, it challenges marketers, their C-suite colleagues and investors to adopt a far more practical and realistic way of interpreting marketing metrics. Rather than viewing performance gaps as failures against obsolete plans, treat them as rich signals about how the market is evolving. Marketing…