Bad Data, Dark Data, & Why Your North Star Keeps Moving
From Making Sense of Martech by Juan Mendoza + Jacqueline Freedman
April 8, 2026 · 39 min · Episode 35
About this episode
Juan and Jacqueline discuss the challenges of data measurement and attribution in marketing, exploring the reasons behind the ROI gap and offering practical solutions.
"We built an entire industry on the promise of precise measurement, and most of us don't actually trust the numbers." — Juan Marketing technology promised precision, but the reality is far messier. In practice, only 3% of CMOs can reliably demonstrate ROI on more than half their total marketing spend. In this Office Hours episode, Jacqueline and Juan unpack the measurement and attribution crisis plaguing enterprise marketing teams. From data fragmentation and siloed dashboards to leadership instability and organizational misalignment, the conversation covers why the ROI gap persists, and what to actually do about it. They go deeper than dashboards, introducing the concept of an "epistemological crisis" in analytics: when teams can't agree on what's true, the entire measurement stack collapses. But it’s not all doom and gloom. Jacqueline and Juan break down practical ways forward from fixing taxonomy and defining a measurement tree to embracing uncertainty and speaking the CFO’s language. Better decisions, not perfect data, should be the goal. Timestamps 00:20 — Martech World Forum recap, data releases, and renewal horror stories 04:34 — The uncomfortable truth about ROI and…
People in this episode
Hosts: Juan, Jacqueline Freedman
Topics covered
- data measurement
- attribution crisis
- marketing technology
- ROI
- data fragmentation
- analytics
Keywords
- data
- ROI
- attribution
- analytics
- measurement
- marketing technology
- data hygiene
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