Perfect attribution is a myth.

You'll never have all the data.

Declining effectiveness has come about because of various misinformed silver bullet trends.

Big data, hyper-targeting, personalisation and the technology that enabled it have meant we’ve lost sight of truly effective marketing.

But the reality is, that we can never truly measure human judgement.

There is always some error through noise and bias.

Humans aren’t machines, they are a chaotic blend of evolution, emotion, and experience.

No algorithm can predict our next move.

To experience how noise and bias from humans contribute to errors in decision-making and measurement, here’s a game which will take less than one minute.

With your phone's stopwatch, your goal is to produce five consecutive laps of exactly 10 seconds without looking at your phone.

Go.

Now look at the lap durations. The laps aren’t all 10 seconds and they vary over a substantial range.

You tried to reproduce the same timing exactly but you were unable to do so.

The variability you couldn’t control is an example of noise.

The human mind is imperfect, it is both biased and noisy.

Let’s stop acting like we can measure everything.

The beauty of humans lies in our unpredictability. It's what keeps life interesting.

We're not line graphs. We're heartbeats.