Asked where B2B marketing is heading, most people reach for the word “AI” and a tone of barely contained excitement. On the Let’s Talk Marketing podcast, revenue operations leader Mira Wise gave Sophie Steffen a calmer and rather more uncomfortable answer: the era of perfect tracking is ending, and a fair number of teams have not finished grieving it yet.
Perfect Tracking Was Always Borrowed Time
Wise frames the current moment as a massive shift, and one moving fast enough to be disorienting. You can feel on top of the tooling on a Friday and discover by Monday that a new model release has rearranged the landscape. That pace is its own challenge. But underneath the churn is a slower, more structural change, and it concerns measurement itself.
The dream that quietly powered a decade of marketing dashboards was that every digital touchpoint could be captured with precision. Wise thinks that dream is expiring. Two forces are retiring it at once. The first is privacy and consent: a growing share of users simply do not grant permission to be tracked. The second is AI-driven research and discovery, which routes buyers toward you through paths that leave no clean, attributable trail.
“Absolute perfect tracking is becoming a bit unrealistic. And yeah, that’s because of privacy, but also because of AI-driven research and discovery.”
The result is the “unknown traffic” category that every marketing team has watched grow. Wise does not expect it to shrink. She expects it to become a permanent and sizable fixture of how digital measurement works, and she thinks some teams are still adjusting to the loss of data points they had quietly come to consider their birthright.
Borrowing a Measurement Mindset From the Billboard
The interesting part of Wise’s argument is not the diagnosis but the prescription, and the prescription comes from an unexpectedly old-fashioned place. She points to the out-of-home campaign (the billboard) as the model for how digital measurement will increasingly have to work.
Nobody has ever attached a clean attribution path to a billboard. You cannot trace a specific motorway sign to a specific signed contract. What you do instead is look at whether traffic or revenue rose in the regions where the ads ran, and you accept the inference as good enough. It is measurement by uplift and trend rather than by precise touchpoint.
“We now need to accept a little bit of a shift towards more trends and uplifts than perfect precision.”
Wise expects digital marketing to drift toward exactly that posture. Track the portion of activity you can. Acknowledge the portion you cannot. Then read movement over time (did the trend lift, did revenue rise) rather than demanding an unbroken line from first click to closed deal. It is a humbler way to measure, and for teams raised on the promise of total attribution, humility is the hard part.
Where the Tools Go Next
Wise is not fatalistic about this. She is fairly confident that new tools will eventually emerge to address the gap, because a problem this widespread tends to attract solutions. What she hopes the industry does not do is regress to manually stamping campaigns by hand, the way marketers once did with the old manual tagging in Google Analytics.
Her more appealing scenario is an AI agent that does the watching for you, something that analyzes the patterns and surfaces the trend shifts a human would miss while staring at a static dashboard. Spotting an uplift is harder than reading a precise number, and it is exactly the kind of work that suits a system designed to notice patterns.
For now, though, Wise places the industry squarely in what she calls the acceptance phase. Teams are still coming to terms with the reality that perfect data is gone. The phase after that (the one where everyone stops mourning and starts asking what to do about it) is where the useful tools will appear. The marketing operations professionals who get there first will be the ones who made their peace with imperfect measurement early, rather than the ones still refreshing a dashboard hoping the unknown traffic goes away.
For the full interview breakdown, see our complete Expert Insight with Mira Wise.
Tools Mentioned in the Interview
The following tools and platforms were referenced during this conversation.
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