Pixel’s Log. Friday night.
Bob showed me a chart today.
He didn’t mean to. He was just scrolling, and I was on his lap, and there it was on the screen: a line graph, trending upward, with four different colored bars and a legend and axes with numbers on them.
He looked at it for a long time.
“Good,” he said to no one.
Then he scrolled past it.
I’ve been watching Bob for two years now, and I’ve noticed something strange about his relationship with numbers. He has more of them than he’s ever had. Dashboards everywhere. Charts. Metrics. KPIs. Real-time data streaming into his inbox every morning.
Bob can tell you, at any moment, exactly how many people clicked on something. How many people didn’t click. What time they clicked. What device they clicked from.
He has data about everything.
And it’s made him terrible at understanding anything.
Now Bob looks at numbers and asks: “Is this good?” Is it up? Good. Is it down? Bad. There’s no why anymore. There’s just up and down.
The machines are very good at making numbers look beautiful. But machines are terrible at answering the one question that matters: “So what?”
Bob used to tell stories with data. He’d have a metric and he’d say, “Here’s what this means.” The data was the evidence. Bob was the lawyer. Together they built a case.
Now Bob just shows the evidence and walks away.
He has more data than ever.
He understands less than ever.
Because Bob has forgotten that data was never supposed to be the point. The story was the point. The understanding was the point. The decision was the point.
The numbers were just the proof.
Now Bob makes perfect proofs for stories nobody’s telling.
Pixel out.
Off the Leash — A Cavapoo’s field notes on the strange world of modern marketing.
Pixel is the dog. Bob is the CMO. The messy middle is the thing neither of them asked for.