13/04/2026
Why Your Marketing Dashboard is Telling You Beautiful Lies
The digital world is currently obsessed with numbers that mean very little in the real world. We have reached a point where every platform has its own secret recipe for success, creating a messy landscape of data silos. Unlike the golden age of television where a single source of truth existed, digital marketing offers no such luxury. “In digital you don’t have any source of any truth,” and we are essentially flying blind while looking at shiny screens.
Your Ad Spend is Buying Ghosts
We have to stop assuming that a high click-through rate means a consumer actually cares about our brand. The reality is that “the amount of ad recall has dropped” significantly. Consumers are being bombarded by so many messages across multiple screens that they simply do not remember the adverts they see.
* Ad recall is at an all-time low because of constant scrolling and screen hopping.
* The traditional “assumption that my input is actually the same as the impact on my mind is just completely broken”.
* “People do not remember advertising because they are being exposed to so much advertising”.
Winning the AI Popularity Contest
The new frontier is not found in a banner ad but in what we call the “share of voice on LLMs”. This means tracking how a brand appears when someone asks a generative AI engine for advice. To win here, brands must return to their roots by prioritising credible sources like digital newspapers and high-quality PR.
* Large Language Models (LLMs) pick up their information from credible, long-form sources.
* “The PR part, which had become less important, becomes more important now” because it feeds the AI engines.
* Tracking the “consumer mind” across every environment is the only way to build a dashboard that actually matters.