For decades, marketing analytics meant advocating for marketing’s impact, not proving it.

The channels that won were the ones that were easiest to measure: Google, Facebook, emails, affiliates, or any platform that made data collection effortless and attribution favorable.

We celebrated dashboards, free conversion datasets, and reporting high ROI. The goal was to tell an uplifting story, not necessarily make the business grow.

And for a long time, it worked. As long as the pie was growing, everyone won.

Why it broke

But it’s 2025, and while everyone’s still doing the same dance, no one has noticed that the music stopped.

Ad platform performance data once aligned to new customers, new sales, and new business growth. But today, for every single purchase marketing generates, there’s dozens of ad platforms reporting positive results. We’ve got more “ad conversions” than we’ve got real outcomes, and this has serious implications.

Revenue has flattened.
Costs have climbed.
Companies are shrinking, and some are disappearing.

Online ad spend has surged, from 13% of all media to over 60%, making advertising as competitive and costly as ever. Remove the top 10 AI-driven stocks from the S&P 500, and the picture looks bleak — businesses are essentially flat, and growth’s going nowhere.

All the while, marketing kept optimizing to what was easy to measure, not what actually mattered. And now, “marketing advocacy” doesn’t work anymore.

You can’t talk your way into a bigger budget.

CFOs don’t care if your report came from an Ivy League Ph.D. — they care about one thing: a green P&L.

Why it must change

Bigger marketing budgets will only come from bigger, more profitable businesses.

And business growth doesn’t come from vanity metrics — it comes from truthful measurement.

Truthful measurement isn’t really about statistical techniques, or causal inference. It’s not about data engineering, data governance, AI, or whatever’s trending on LinkedIn.

It’s about intent.

You can define it simply:

When numbers go up in marketing reports, do they go up in business results?
Does marketing ROI align with the P&L?
When you reallocate spend based on your marketing measurement, do you see greater returns?

If your answers are yes, you’re measuring truthfully.

If you can do that with rigor, speed, and scale, you’re got truthful measurement done the modern way.

Why it matters

The only thing that grows marketing budgets now is growing the business. The share of revenue going to your marketing budget won’t increase until your company’s top and bottom lines do. That starts with measurement that reflects reality, not reassurance.

PR dressed as data science might make that spend look good this week, but accurate, truthful measurement builds businesses that last.

At Bonsai, measurement is journalism, not advocacy. We help marketers use the truth to become an engine of growth,  ensuring every dollar drives business impact.

Truth builds trust. Trust builds growth. Growth brings back bigger budgets.

That’s the cycle worth advocating for.

The era of marketing advocacy is over.

The era of marketing accountability has begun.