Your dashboard is haunted

Halloween is almost here, so we’re hunting zombie stats: numbers that get debunked but stick around anyway. Chief Analytics Officer Matt Hultgren joins the show to sort out which metrics deserve your trust and which should be buried.

—Elena

Up to 75% of marketers say their measurement approach is falling short.

IAB’s State of Data 2026 report found that 60-75% of marketers rate their measurement as lacking in rigor, timeliness, trust, or efficiency. MMM users flagged blind spots too, with 77% saying gaming is underrepresented, along with 41% for CTV and 38% for linear TV.

 

The numbers are dead. The habits aren’t.

 

What are zombie statistics?

Debunked numbers that keep getting repeated as fact. Take the rule of seven, which says buyers need seven touchpoints to purchase. Matt has studied frequency for a decade and never found a magic number. Some buyers act after one exposure, and others won’t budge after 20.

What happens when measurement sets the strategy?

Your marketing starts serving the dashboard instead of the business. Budgets drift toward whatever is easiest to measure. Pull money from TV because attribution misses it, and within months branded search slips and acquisition costs rise across digital. You’ve cut the channel that was feeding all the others.

How should a CMO talk about uncertainty?

Separate accountability from certainty. A 4.27x return on ad spend sounds precise until your CFO asks about the confidence interval. Show three methods pointing to a range of returns instead. That gives your CFO enough credible evidence to allocate capital.

How long should your attribution window be?

Shorter than your sales cycle. Matt says most new CTV advertisers come in with windows that run too long. Have your data science team map the attribution curve by day, then pick the window that gives the most accurate read.

 

Listen in on our discussion.

 

“IAB State of Data 2026: The AI-Powered Measurement Transformation”

IAB surveyed more than 400 senior planning and analytics decision-makers at brands and agencies to see where attribution, incrementality, and MMM fall short, and how AI might close the gaps.

Read the article.

 

Measurement needs a margin of error.

“It is better to be vaguely right than exactly wrong.”

— Carveth Read, philosopher and author of Logic: Deductive and Inductive

This newsletter comes from the hosts of The Marketing Architects, a research-first show answering your biggest marketing questions. Find us on Apple Podcasts or wherever you listen to podcasts.