Marketoonist: "7 Deadly Sins of Data-Driven Marketing" cartoon

Weekly hand-drawn business cartoon from Marketoonist Tom Fishburne

Author

Tom Fishburne
October 14, 2024

Welcome back to Marketoonist, the cartoon I’ve been hand-drawing to poke fun at marketing and business nearly every week since 2002. Was this email forwarded to you? Please subscribe here.

7 Deadly Sins of Data-Driven Marketing

My cartoons are often inspired by something I overheard the previous week. Last week, I traveled to speak at the GPeC Summit in Romania and got to hear UnMarketing author Scott Stratten’s entertaining take on marketing while I was there.

Part of Scott’s talk included a rant on vanity metrics — the seductive allure of focusing on data that makes us look good. Vanity metrics are particularly rampant in digital marketing and can cause us to make really bad decisions.

The term “vanity metrics” were first coined by Eric Reis in the Lean Startup. As Eric put it:

“Vanity metrics may make you feel good, but they don’t offer clear guidance for what to do next.”

The idea of vanity metrics got me thinking about each of the seven deadly sins and how they might apply in this increasingly data-driven world.

Data is never just about the data — it’s how we use and make sense of the data. How we interpret the data is subject to the same human biases and foibles that drive everything else we do. 

Of course AI promises to help with data-driven decision making and yet AI is fueled by many of these same biases and foibles. As we look at the data, we have to continually sense-check where it came from and how we’re using it.

Speaking in Utrecht and London this week

I’m posting this from Utrecht in The Netherlands, right after speaking at Het Leukste Event over Marketing Psychologie. Later this week, I’m kicking off Anticon in London. I look forward to meeting some of you there, as well as some of these other spots over the next month:

Please let me know if you’d ever like to talk about bringing levity to any events you’re planning. And please recommend me to friends or colleagues.

And here are a couple quick photos from GPeC Summit in Bucharest last week.

Cartoon from the archives

Here’s a related one from 2016.

Thank you for all of your support (and cartoon material)!

-Tom

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About Marketoonist

Marketoonist is the thought bubble of me, Tom Fishburne. I first started drawing cartoons as a student in the Harvard Business School newspaper (not quite as well-known for humor as the Lampoon) and later started this newsletter from a General Mills cubicle in 2002. The cartoons have followed my career ever since. I poke fun at the ever-changing world of marketing and business because I believe that laughing at ourselves can help us do our best work.