t was great to be back up on stage and thanks to Brand Leadership Community for the opportunity to speak at the Brand Analytics Jam Session in Copenhagen last Friday. The theme was the MarTech gap with the challenge of why companies aren’t seeing the business impact from their investments in Digital Analytics technology.
All four speakers made the same argument, from different perspectives, that this is not a technology issue. My starting point was that even calling it a MarTech gap is part of the problem, it is a misdiagnosis from the very start. The ability to access the data and get answers has never been easier, from self service UIs, data stored in your Data Lake and now, answers directly via AI. But with all this, it is not changing the decisions people are making and the actions they are taking, the blocker is not the technology.
My argument is that it is the human thinking that needs to be worked on.
In many sector such as retail, the same business problems and questions exist as they did hundreds of years ago. We have many more answers but keep not asking these old questions.
We need to realign our thinking, both data and business people, onto understanding the website/app visitors and our customers, to realise the value from the investment. For Data people, this means a focus on people and their behaviour, not on the data itself – more business solutions and less data products. And for the business people, a focus on the WHY instead of the WHAT and HOW.
If your organisation has invested in the technology but is struggling to get the business impact you need, get in touch. I help to focus teams’ thinking on using digital data to understand people, not just on understanding data.
Tim Ceuppens took some great notes of the presentations from myself, Robert Alexander Johnson Kasper Andersen and Wojciech Zak.
This post was originally published on LinkedIn on 9th June 2026. View the original post and discussion here.
