Where Data Stops in Marketing: A CTO's Notes on Data-Driven Marketing

Sat, 10 Oct 2026 00:00:00 +0000

In June 2026 I wrote an internal post at Buser with a title I liked more than I should have: "Marketing is now MarTech". Marketing moved under Technology, and I, the CTO, became accountable for it. The reason was practical. A good marketing idea lost speed waiting in the tech and data queue, and putting engineering and data science next to marketing closes the loop between a decision and its measurement. But the sentence I cared about most in that post was another one: marketing strategy decides what the data should chase. Four months in, I still think that sentence is right, and I now think it is the hardest part of data-driven marketing, because data will chase anything you point it at, with total confidence, and report success the whole way. This post is my attempt to organize what I have been reading and living since then, written by someone whose instinct is to trust the funnel and who is learning, slowly, where that instinct breaks.

Marketing on Thiago Avelino

Where Data Stops in Marketing: A CTO's Notes on Data-Driven Marketing