A Case for Ambiguity in Data-Driven Marketing

The field of epistemology is one of the core pillars of philosophy, and it can be
paraphrased into a question that gets to the soft and wiggly center of any truth we
try to defend: How do you know what you know? Epistemology is the study of the
origins of knowledge, and this question of how we know anything is often glossed
over in our daily lives because it is usually more convenient to just accept what we are
seeing as true enough to help us determine our courses of action.

In God we trust, all others bring data William

Edwards Deming, Statistician, Engineer, and Author
In marketing, we point at data in the forms of customer feedback or online/mobile
tracking of users as the source of our knowledge. We trust the numbers. We trust the
numbers so much, in fact, that every major digital marketing channel now makes
available some form of tracking to link digital events back to ads as a cost-free part of
their platform because it is assumed this tracking will be used to justify more ad
budget. This technology is a formidable source of insight into the chain of facts
surrounding a conversion, and we can draw conclusions in the form of
receptiveness from audiences or the ability to generate revenue. All the same, the
limitations of this data come both in 1) the narrowness of what is reported and 2) the
separation between facts and meaning.
Rather than looking at how we do marketing analytics as a framing issue by
assuming the data can reveal the truth as long as we are identifying the right goals,
marketers will find greater freedom to set and adapt smart strategies if they recognize
the ambiguity inherent in the data we collect. In other words, marketers should

consider marketing as more of an exploration of shifting probabilities rather than the

uncovering of the truth about customers.

The epistemic problem in marketing

With sales, the connection between the work a salesperson does and the revenue for
which they are responsible is fairly direct. Sales sells to prospects, completes the sale,
and reports the revenue. The salesperson has limited data in terms of overall numbers
of transactions, but they have their own understanding of the relationships they
manage, the specific needs of their clients, and the tactical elements of their sales
process that seem to work. Marketers tend to have much broader fields of influence
and far more tenuous connections between their efforts and how they shape the
growth of a business.
For example, television and radio broadcasts blanket entire regions, helping to raise
awareness of products or events for the individuals within those regions. Tracking the
efficacy of these campaigns is done via statistical analysis, either at the user level by
way of surveys or at the regional level by testing ads in some markets (but not others)
and looking for higher revenue gains (or lesser losses) in the test areas as compared to
the non-test areas. We start with a hypothesis that the ads will not generate a
noticeable outcome and then we test to disprove this hypothesis.
In this example, however, we still cannot remove all doubt that these test regions were
responding to other factors, and the overall process of determining the effectiveness of
the ads being tested takes enough time that the conditions of the test may not

accurately reflect the conditions of the actual competitive environment by the time we
commit to an overall launch. Our knowledge is imperfect. We run campaigns anyway
because the knowledge we have is often the best we can find among the impossible
ambiguity of human interactions. The math is good enough that we know theres a
relationship between the ads and the publics response, but we do not necessarily
know why they respond.
Digital marketers have more tools available to increase the accuracy of our
understanding of the customer journey, as well as an incredible amount of collected
data from which we can draw potential theories to test. The conflagration of
databases, audience pixels, first party data, onlined data, third-party data, and data
management platforms to parse and organize this information over the past two
decades is staggering to the uninitiated. We now have more information about
audiences and better insight into digital customer journeys than ever before, which
enables more accurate targeting and better personalization of ads, ad experiences, and
digital experiences writ large.
The information we glean from all of this structured data allows us to see valuable
probabilities (e.g. audience A is more likely than the overall population to be
interested in topic D or audience B is more likely to engage in online behavior C), but
we still basically have little direct understanding of why the relationships between
these audiences and their affinities or behaviors exist. We have ways to demonstrate
that we know a conversion happened, but this is not the same as knowing the source
of a customers motivation to convert.
Why do people see value in [stuff]? How do you know?

The limits of attribution

We talk about conversions and tracking using terms like causal to reference the
relationship between marketing activities and end results, with the implied conceit that
our marketing efforts caused audiences to act rather than some intrinsic motivation
tied to the actual utility of the product or service offered. While Coca-Cola may have
some credence to such a claim, the vast majority of us do not.
Instead, we have systems of tools that enable us to attribute activities to actions as if
they were causally linked the way actions in physics tend to be (e.g. Newtons third
law of motion: every action has an equal and opposite reaction). We can launch a
search marketing campaign, connect our ads to a conversion pixel, and get a report for
every time someone clicks on an ad and then goes on to do something on a website
that fires the conversion pixel. We know they saw enough value at the time to
convert without knowing why, and this is works fairly well when executed correctly.
When we run multi-ad or multi-channel campaigns, we can have several of these
platformsincluding

search, social, and display networksdoing

the same task of
delivering ads and reporting on when someone who interacted with an ad does a
desirable action on site. Attribution becomes much more difficult when a member of
the target audience is served ads on or interacts with ads on multiple platforms before
doing that desirable action. Which ad caused the action to occur? Each ad platform
will claim the conversion as their own, leading to duplication and over-reporting. How
do we share credit if multiple actions are to be considered the cause? In this way, even
getting a clear understanding of this limited version of causality is less than clear.

An answer to attribution sharing has been to assign weight to interactions as part of

this multi-touch, cross-channel customer journey. The most common model for the
past decade or so is something called a last touch model, which basically just gives
credit to the last channel where an ad was clicked. Google Analytics reporting defaults
to last click reporting, which makes perfect sense given Googles historical revenue
generator has been Google search ads (generally a down-funnel, final interaction
before conversion occurs). Other basic models are available, including models that
give credit to the first ad that leads a user to a site, models that distribute credit evenly
across multiple touches, and others that spread attribution in other ways.
Generally, a good marketer or analyst will experiment with many models before
settling in on one they find instructive for what to do next. All the same, these models
are ways of adapting to customer motivations without actually discovering them. At
Accomplice, we are developing models that adjust their own weight distribution to
enable our automated optimization to work more efficiently. This helps us lead clients
farther down the path to understanding but ultimately does not bridge the knowledge
gap between the sequence of events we observe and the actual reality of why our
target audiences do what they do. It will work better for doing marketing, but it the
tool we offer is still just a machine.
This question for marketershow

do we know that our marketing is effectiveis

a critical question because we never truly know what motivates purchaser behavior,
even though the technology we now have available to use makes it possible to test
faster, refine our theories, optimize our outcomes, and narrow down the scope of what
could possibly lead a prospect to become a customer. Unlike some philosophical takes
on the epistemic question, where we reach an impasse of infinite regression (like a
toddler asking why after each successive explanation), we have the benefit of

falling back on fallibility, testability, and the realization that ambiguity is not so
terrible after all. Theres a good reason marketing is considered both an art and a
science.

Schrdingers marketing campaign (recognizing ambiguity)

Though we have addressed the kind of physics many learn in high school or their
freshman year of college, more contemporary physics embraces a much less
mechanistic understanding of the universe. In quantum mechanics, physicists embrace
ambiguity and uncertainty in the way our universe manifests itself. The basic particles
that make up all of the things in existence behave strangely at the infinitesimally small
scale. One of the more famous observations of these particles is the Heisenberg
uncertainty principle: the more precisely we observe the position of a particle, the less
precisely its velocity can be observed. Otherwise stated, we can know where a particle
is or how fast it is moving, but not both things at the same time. While our
consciousness of marketing does not work precisely the same way, there are some
examples of Heisenbergs principle that we can use by analogy to help us understand
how ambiguity in marketing can work for us.
Among the more common ways to look at the Heisenberg uncertainty principle is a
thought experiment devised by Erwin Schrdinger concerning a cat, a vial of poison,
and a source of radioactivity. The experiment posits a scenario where the cat is locked
in a box with the poison and the radioactive material, and if a monitor inside the box
detects radiation (from particle decay) the poison is released and the cat dies. Until the

box is opened, and the cat is observed, the cat exists to viewers of this horrible
spectacle as if it is present in all of the possible states available to it: alive and dead.
Until we are measuring a marketing campaign, it exists in a similar sort of multipossibility state, but by measuring the campaign we collapse the overall number of
probable outcomes of its performance down to what we have observed. We make
decisions based on what we see and test for other possibilities from our campaign,
revisiting and redirecting the overall field of possibilities available to our campaigns
until our time or budgets run out. At Accomplice, this process or repetition is part of
how we automate optimizations, acknowledging the simple fact that every time we
make a decision we open up the field of possibilities to test again and learn anew what
generates the kind of performance we are seeking.
Every time we launch a campaign, we are embracing ambiguity, if only until we can
crunch the numbers to determine our performance and set new campaign parameters.
Likewise, even if we have an understanding of current campaign reporting, we do not
have access to the evolving motivations of clients or the great aggregate of other
factors that appear by chance to skew our results. Where Heisenbergs principle
proves to be true regardless the reach of our technology, it is not yet clear whether
marketing will be unable to bridge the gap between performance and understanding.
Pursuing understanding from the limited capacity of the knowledge we can develop
from technology gets the roles of marketing and technology fundamentally
backwards. If we build our campaigns around theories regarding the motivations of
our audiences, the technology allows us to quickly disprove erroneous and irrelevant
theories and begin forming harder to disprove understandings of audience
motivations. Marketing, like economics and sociology, is a study of motivations and

cultural factors that contribute to social interactions. Framing the use of data, or a test
for motivations for that matter, is important to marketing success, but it is only a
smaller part of the greater realization that what we are doing is leveraging technology
to learn more about why people make decisions and take action.
Until we are studying motivations, even as we frame our tests in the context of
generating the revenue that keeps our companies or clients afloat, we are condemned
to do our work amidst the uncertainty of an infinite array of possibilities for why our
campaigns succeed or fail. The technology makes it easier to forget how little we
actually know.

Addressing the knowledge gap

The framing of many marketing campaigns starts with a strategy in the form of a
story: Here is a product or service that has a particular value, and it will be valuable to
some segment of the population, and this segment will be approached with messaging
that will appeal to them via channels they tend to use. If we come from the context of
the management theory of Peter Drucker, we know how critical getting this story right
really is in terms of our responsibility to our clients and companies.

Because the purpose of business is to create a customer,

the business enterprise has twoand only twobasic
functions: marketing and innovation. Marketing and
innovation produce results; all the rest are costs.
Marketing is the distinguishing, unique function of the

business.Peter Drucker, Management Consultant,

Educator, and Author
The difference between a target audience member and a customer can be fairly stated
as a conversion, which we often see in marketing. This is not just jargon because the
people we market to go from one state of being (target) to another (customer). Unless
we can observe the marketing we are doing, these targets or customers effectively
exist in both states. The measuring we do as part of our work as marketers needs to be
geared toward testing theories regarding why people become customers. Druckers
emphasis on innovation is not accidental, as innovation is the development of new
utility or value for potential customers, and the work of marketing is to determine and
execute the best course of communicating this value in a way that resonates with a
customers motivations. We do more than just drink coffee and wave our hands.
For a salesperson, exploring motivations in a one-to-one setting is part of a
conversation. While a savvy salesperson may intuit or extrapolate in order to identify
other motivations, sales is still a function of matching up the final details connecting
customer motivations to expected product value. Marketers are tasked with defining
the entire context of a sales conversation or create the opportunity for a customer to
simply convert on their own. Acknowledging that we do not know why a customer
converts, rather than simply asserting the value we think is intrinsic in our product or
service as a proxy for that motivation, starts us on an honest path of asking questions
about how to close the gap between what we can measure and what we can
understand.
Asking customers why they chose to convert is as important now as it was before the
proliferation of digital marketing technology and channels. Soliciting product or

service feedback and listening to how customers and prospects describe their
motivations is as important now as it was before the proliferation of digital marketing
technology and channels. Stimulating discussions with customers regarding how we
communicate new products, services, and features is as important now as it was
before the proliferation of digital marketing technology and channels.
This likely seems basic, especially given the references to physics and philosophy, but
these are fundamental actions for marketers who intend to understand their customer
and run successful marketing programs. Marketing data and marketing measurement
are incredibly powerful tools that refine down the minutiae of campaign effectiveness,
but the over-dependence on these forms of knowledge can lead to data-driven myopia
regarding the bigger picture of what marketing is meant to do.
We communicate value.
Everything else we do must be in service of this function, and the testing we do needs
to be centered around the search for probable motivations rather than simply
maximizing KPIs. The technology we use helps us to better understand whether we
are communicating effectively and should be used to help us test the messages we
create to address probable customer motivations. Realizing a KPI maximum for a
single campaign will not drive the kind of marketing success a working understanding
of customer motivations will bring in the long run.

Conclusions

If we begin with the assumption that our knowledge and understanding are fallible,
and we interact with customers directly or via our marketing campaigns with the goal
of invalidating all of our theories about what motivates conversions, then we have a
hope of narrowing down what motivates customers to convert. With that knowledge,
we can re-form marketing efforts and concentrate product development in useful ways
for our clients and company performance.
We cannot be afraid to be wrong because we need to be wrong often enough to
understand how to do our jobs right. In the end, we still will not completely bridge the
gap and fully understand the depth and complexity behind the motivations of
customers. We will, however, be able to answer for all of the motivations we know
have not lead to conversions. More importantly, we will be able to answer for all of
the customer motivations we can continue to use in tests because we have not yet been
able to invalidate them using the technology we have available. Thats far more useful
than the limited number of things we can know for certain.
Our campaigns are experiments to figure out how to better serve our customers and
their motivations. If this our goal, the money will follow.
Many thanks to Idan B and Jess W for reviews and edits prior to the publishing of this
version of the post.
If you liked this post, please do me the favor of recommending it and/or sharing with
your friends and colleagues through social. I wrote this to distill and share some of
what Ive learned with my coworkers, clients, and readers. If its something you like
then Id be honored for you to spread this post as well.

Also, feel free to reach out of me on Twitter (@indasein) for any comments, feedback,
or to share your own thoughts. Thanks!