Every metric on a dashboard is the end of a chain of decisions, and most were made by someone who never wrote them down. Which average gets reported. Where the cutoff sits. What “engagement” gets divided by. Each one looks like a technical detail, and each one can flip the story a leader hears.

This session draws on two vantage points: fifteen years in marketing, most recently leading marketing for the Americas at Optimas, and doctoral research on how AI models read social networks to predict consumer behavior. I’ll share what I’ve found about where metrics most often mislead. Popular measures like reach turn out to be weak stand-ins for influence. Averages hide the story in skewed data. Small definition choices quietly reorder rankings. From there, we’ll turn those findings into practices you can bring back to your team.

You’ll leave with:

The most common hidden decisions behind business metrics, and how to spot them
Best practices for documenting and defending metric definitions
A checklist for questioning a metric before it ships
Language for explaining these choices to non-technical stakeholders without losing the room