I remember the first time a number lied to me. Well, maybe it didn’t lie, so to speak. It was a click-through rate on a banner campaign that had tanked overnight. My first instinct was to panic (I used to do that sometimes). My second instinct was to blame the creative. It took someone else to point out that the number wasn't wrong. It was incomplete. A competitor had launched a promotion the same week, traffic patterns had shifted across the entire site, and the campaign hadn't gotten worse. The context around it had changed. The signal was real. The story I told myself about it was not.

I've been thinking about that idea lately. I think it's happening everywhere. We are drowning in signal right now. Every platform gives you a dashboard, every dashboard gives you a number, and every number seems to demand an immediate verdict. The campaign's up. The campaign's down. Ship it or kill it. A signal without context isn't information. It's just noise wearing a suit. The harder truth is that most of us are making decisions on the noise because we don't have the patience, or the tooling, or, honestly, the humility to wait for the context to arrive. Context can complete the story.

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In quantum mechanics, a particle doesn't have a fixed state until you observe it. Before that, it exists as a range of possibilities, layered on top of each other, and it's the act of measurement itself that forces it to resolve into one outcome. Physicists call this superposition. Most people know it from the thought experiment with the cat in the box, alive and dead at once until someone lifts the lid. I'm not going to make you sit through the cat again. What I want you to sit with instead is the idea underneath it: the outcome isn't hiding from you, waiting to be discovered. In a real sense, it doesn't exist yet. Observation doesn't just reveal the state. It creates it.

That is exactly what's happening every time you look at a campaign dashboard. The number in front of you isn't a fixed truth waiting for you to notice it. It's a collapse of a much messier reality into a single reading, and which reality it collapses from depends entirely on the context you bring to the measurement. Look at that cratered CTR through the lens of creative fatigue, and you'll conclude the creative is dead. Look at it through the lens of a competitor's promotion, and you'll conclude the market moved, not the ad. Same number. Two completely different stories. The metaphor actually gets more dangerous than the physics, because in quantum mechanics, the observer doesn't change what's real, only what we know about it. In marketing, the story you choose changes what you do next, which changes what's actually real going forward. We're not just measuring the funnel. We're steering it based on which measurement we decided to believe.

This would be a solvable problem if the thing being measured held still. It doesn't. The customer used to move down a funnel whose shape we more or less controlled. Awareness, consideration, conversion, in a tidy line we could draw on a whiteboard and defend in a quarterly review. That funnel is a fossil now. The customer today exists in something closer to superposition. Skeptical and ready at the same time. Aware of your brand through three unrelated channels they don't remember discovering. Half convinced by a review they read on a platform your attribution model doesn't even track. They are, in a real sense, in multiple states at once, right up until the moment they buy, or don't, and it's only after that moment that we reach backward and draw a path that makes it look like they were always headed there. The customer journey map isn't a map. It's a story we tell after the fact to make an unpredictable collapse feel like it was inevitable.

I don't say any of this to make the case for paralysis. I've watched too many good ideas die in a committee that wanted one more report before deciding anything. The answer isn't to distrust every signal until you've built a perfect model of context, because that model will never exist and the market won't wait for it. The answer is closer to something physicists actually practice, which is holding an uncertain state loosely instead of collapsing it too early just because a clean answer feels better than an honest one. Ask what else could be true before you commit to what you want to be true. Build a team that's allowed to say "we don't know yet" without that being read as weakness. Wait for the second signal before you write the story the first one seems to be telling you, because the first one, on its own, is almost never the whole picture.

In a world where the customer no longer moves in a straight line, the marketer who insists on a straight-line story is the one about to get it wrong. The rest of us are going to have to get comfortable living in the superposition a little longer than feels natural, and know that context will help you make the right call.

Don’t forget to click on the advertiser (Hubspot) - every click helps!

Cory