• by Tim Ringel , Yesterday

There is a dangerous myth taking hold in brand boardrooms: Every marketing decision can (and should) be justified by a KPI before it’s executed.

I’ve watched the scenario play out countless times. A creative team presents a bold campaign idea, the energy in the room is electric, everyone knows it could be a breakthrough, and then someone asks: “But what does the data say?”

And just like that, the spark of inspiration dies.

I’d argue that the obsession with measurement is killing the very thing that makes marketing work: the willingness to take creative risks. I’m not advocating for reckless spending or abandoning accountability, but somewhere along the way we confused measurement with strategy. We started believing that if we couldn’t predict the exact ROI of an idea upfront, it wasn’t worth pursuing.

That’s backwards thinking. Why? Because the most successful campaigns I have been part of, the ones that really moved the needle for brands, did not come from optimizing existing approaches; they came from someone saying, “I believe this will work,” and having the courage to bet on it before the data could validate it.

The digital revolution promised unprecedented visibility into consumer behavior, and it delivered. We can now track every interaction, measure every touchpoint, optimize every pixel. That capability is powerful, but it’s also dangerous. When everything is measurable, we start to believe that only measurable things matter. We prioritize short-term conversions over long-term brand building. We A/B test ourselves into mediocrity. We confuse clicks with creativity.

I see the tension play out with clients all the time. Marketing leaders are under immense pressure to demonstrate immediate returns. After all, quarterly earnings calls don’t reward patience, and CFOs demand proof, not promises. That’s why so often marketers retreat to what’s safe, what’s quantifiable, what’s already been done, even when they know it won’t break through the clutter.

The thing is, though, that breakthrough marketing requires leaps of faith. Always has, always will.

Think about the campaigns that matter, the ones people remember, the ones that fundamentally change how they perceive a brand. Few of those came from rigorous KPI analysis; they came from instinct, experience and the courage to do something different.

That doesn’t mean metrics don’t matter, but their role should be to validate innovation after the fact, not to serve as a gatekeeper beforehand. Innovation requires betting on things before they’re proven, and it requires trusting talented people to make a creative leap.

The marketing business has always been at its best when it balanced art and science, intuition and analysis, creativity and accountability. Today, the pendulum has swung too far toward the numbers at the expense of the innovation.

It’s time we corrected that balance, not by abandoning metrics but by refusing to let them become a barrier to bold thinking.

The future will not be built by marketers who can optimize the existing playbook but by those who are brave enough to write the new one, even when the spreadsheets cannot yet prove they’re right.