— Summaries and analyses of insights from Mark Stouse on leveraging data and analytics to optimize marketing performance. —
Companies that eliminated marketing during the pandemic and then publicly celebrated the absence of any immediate revenue drop were, in effect, living on borrowed time. The structural reality is that a reasonably robust B2B marketing program carries a hangover effect — roughly a year to eighteen mon
Between November 2019 and February 2020 — weeks before COVID-19 registered as a public crisis — Proof Analytics began flagging an anomalous, non-seasonal decline in the performance of in-person events for Johnson Controls. The data offered no explanation, only a signal: something was wrong. Trusting
A confrontation with then-HP CEO Mark Hurd over marketing's inability to prove its value sent Mark Stouse home one Friday to excavate old university math textbooks from his garage. A non-mathematician by training, he was searching for a defensible answer to a straightforward question: what is market
The origin of Proof Analytics is not a tidy founder story — it begins with wounded professional pride. Working at HP, Stouse grew increasingly frustrated when business leaders dismissed marketing as a cost centre that couldn't demonstrate measurable return. His response was not to argue back but to
When analytics began flagging that Johnson Controls' field marketing investments — historically among its strongest performing channels — were deteriorating rapidly in early spring 2020, the company acted before any external explanation was obvious. Instruments were showing trouble before the pilots