Repetition in a stable context makes behaviour more automatic.
More quotes“Engagement is up 38 per cent.”
“Lovely. Did we sell anything?”
“That is harder to attribute.”
There, in three lines, is half the bullshit in modern marketing.
A proxy normally goes wrong in three acts. First it is a useful hint: views suggest reach, clicks suggest interest, awards suggest somebody in a black polo neck enjoyed the work. Then it appears in a target. Finally, clever people learn to manufacture the number without manufacturing the result.
Then the machine works perfectly. Headlines grow more desperate because outrage earns comments. Videos chase three-second views from thumbs trying to escape. Teams celebrate cheap leads that sales cannot use. The report is green; the business remains stubbornly beige.
People optimise whatever gets inspected, rewarded and presented upstairs. If the metric can rise while the commercial outcome falls, it is not a steering wheel. It is dashboard jewellery.
The awkward question is embarrassingly plain: what must happen between this number rising and the business improving? If nobody can describe the chain, the proxy is decorative. If the chain takes time or contains uncertainty, say so. Uncertainty may be commercially inconvenient, but it does not turn an available number into an important one. “A million impressions,” says the report. “A million people scrolling past,” says the person still waiting for a sale.