Models don’t kill imagination, they kill delusion
This piece, from analytic platform Prophet’s CEO Jordan Taylor-Bartels, is the second we have run in response to Jen Davidson’s Marketing’s dangerous obsession yesterday. Taylor-Bartels argues that modern MMM is far from a simple predictor, and is not contradictory to creativity: “the idea that modelling threatens creativity does not match how great work is made”.
The author Jordan Taylor-Bartels
Marketing has always lived with a tension between art and evidence.
Jen Davidson’s recent piece names one side of that tension with clarity. She is right that any model treated as a substitute for thinking will weaken strategy. She is right that creativity loses altitude when numbers are used as shields rather than instruments. These are important cautions. The issue is what follows. Her argument treats the limitations of outdated models as proof that modern measurement has become a dangerous fixation. That part does not hold.
The idea that measurement is now undermining creativity resolves a complex debate by blaming the instrument rather than accounting for the conditions marketers actually work in. The world has become structurally harder to read. Australian interest rates shifted many times in eighteen months. Consumer confidence moves sharply whenever inflation updates land. Retail categories rise or contract on the basis of a single ABS release. Leaders are not reaching for models because of obsession. They are reaching for models because no one can navigate volatility like this with instinct alone.
