Most Marketing Teams Are Measuring the Wrong Things. And They Know It.

Not because they lack data. Not because the tools aren't there. But because no one has stopped to ask the only question that actually matters: what behavior are you trying to change?

That's the question Maury Demner has been asking for twenty years, across JPMorgan Chase, Merkle, Bloomberg Industry Group, and now Carson Group. He runs his own consultancy, Measure with Purpose, and his tagline might be the most honest thing I've read in this industry: "Measuring everything leads to clutter, not clarity."

The challah bread problem

Maury tells a story about trying to bake challah on New Year's Day. He was so fixated on getting the flour exactly right that he forgot two eggs. The whole thing fell apart.

The parallel to marketing measurement is direct: we obsess over statistical significance, click-through rates, and dashboard completeness, and forget to ask whether any of it is moving the thing we actually care about.

"At the end of the day, when you're talking about quantities in the tens of thousands, typical for a lot of mid-market organizations, a 10 basis point difference just doesn't matter."

The goal of marketing is to influence a behavior. Full stop. Everything else is a proxy. And proxies become a problem when we start managing to them instead of managing to the outcome.

The dashboard you don't actually need

A colleague at Merkle had a standing rule: always start a project with a dashboard. Maury admitted he found this frustrating at first. He was already deeply disillusioned with over-built dashboards.

But the colleague continued: the magic isn't the dashboard. The magic is in the process of building it. That's where the real conversations happen. The ones about what you're actually trying to see. How the pieces of data fit together. Where the gaps are.

The dashboard itself? Useful for a hot minute. What lasts is the shared understanding you built on the way there.

"Those baked-in dashboards. I've never really found a use for them. You end up managing to the tool instead of managing to your business needs."

Funnels as flat maps

Maury has a useful frame for funnels. They're like a flat map versus a globe. We know the earth is round. We know the most direct flight from Maryland to Norway goes over the poles. But nobody walks around with a globe. A flat map is good enough for everyday navigation.

Funnels work the same way. Useful for orientation. Not a literal description of reality. The problem isn't using funnels. It's when the framework takes over, when the team starts arguing about stage definitions instead of asking what decision each stage is supposed to drive.

AI and the early internet

Maury graduated in 1997, which means he actually lived through the moment he's drawing a parallel to. His read on AI right now: it feels a lot like the early internet inside most companies. Technically available. Enthusiastically explored at home. But internally? Still on lockdown, still requiring forms, still governed by IT.

And the companies best positioned to break through aren't the large legacy organizations burdened by technical debt and organizational politics. It's mid-market companies: the ones with enough stability to invest, but without the baggage that slows everything down.

"Mid-market companies are playing to win. The big ones are playing not to lose."

That line stayed with me. Because it's not just about AI. It's about how organizations make decisions when the stakes are real and the structure is lean enough to actually move.

The invisible voice of wisdom

Near the end of our conversation, Maury pushed back on a frame I think most of us fall into. MOps isn't the boiler room. It's the light and sound engineers. Not the roadies. The technicians who make everything possible, and who have a real appreciation for what they bring to the table.

And the best MOps professionals aren't just keeping the show running. They're the invisible voice of wisdom. Looking across the entire operation. Seeing what's working, what isn't. Giving the quiet push that helps the strategist ask the right question, even if that's nowhere in the job description.

The bottom line

If you take one thing from this conversation, make it this question: what behavior are you trying to influence? Not what can you measure. Not what does the tool already show you. What is the actual human action you're trying to move?

Everything else, funnels, dashboards, attribution models, is scaffolding. Useful scaffolding, done right. But scaffolding isn't the building.

Find Maury on LinkedIn and at: measurewithpurpose.com