How dirty data broke marketing | MarTech

"I've seen how easily a single point of view can harden into truth, even when it's only one slice of the story. In my own life, I've watched situations where someone presented their interpretation with confidence. That version spread because it was familiar and straightforward, not because it reflected the whole picture. People tend to accept the first narrative they hear. Then, they repeat it, build on it and soon a partial account starts functioning as fact. Not because it's accurate, but because it's convenient."

"The marketing industry has been acting as if more data automatically creates more insight. But the logic falls apart quickly. Imagine a police department solving cases with gossip, misunderstandings, coincidence, dreams and rumors, then presenting that as forensic science. That's how marketing treats most of its data - not as verified truth, but as speculation packaged as intelligence. Instead of moving from data to wisdom, the industry is moving from assumption to illusion and calling it progress."

Marketing systems routinely convert partial, biased, and misinterpreted signals into decisions presented as definitive insight. Big Tech monetizes predictions from pervasive surveillance while data brokers assemble detailed profiles from behavioral scraps. Survey platforms incentivize rushed or fabricated responses, and martech/adtech layers obscure contaminated inputs behind complexity and fees. Dashboards, segments, and attribution models treat limited viewpoints as objective truth, but formatting, deduplication, or fraud filters cannot recover missing intent or dignity. The industry treats speculation as intelligence, moving from assumption to illusion rather than progressing from data through information and insight toward genuine wisdom.

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