This post is based on insights from the Sailthru ebook “2015 Marketing Technology Predictions: The Future of Marketing” available for download now.

Instead of being inspired by the novelty of dashboards, marketers are now exhausted by their ubiquity. There’s good reason they’re boring marketers to tears: Essentially, most dashboards are bottom-feeder visualizations that don’t give marketers the insight they need. For a while, though, when no one was asking the tough questions, it was great to be able to throw a slew of those visualizations into a PowerPoint presentation and impress teams across an organization with graphically-represented “progress.”

Now everyone is asking the tough questions. And no one needs or wants to wade through 8,000 dashboards to find the data that’s truly relevant. Dashboards date from the age when marketers had little information, so any scrap was welcome. Now they have, quite literally, more data than they know what to do with. The truth of 2015 is that marketers don’t need more data, they need to derive better information from all that data. Ideally, they’d just like to see the metrics that are proven to matter to their business.

As more organizations become data-centric, the idea of sharing all these dashboards throughout the organization, and relying upon each individual user to sort through the information to achieve an actual insight, makes less and less sense. You want to share the information that is related to business needs, and not waste anyone’s time with the rest. You need to be done with chasing shiny data.

The dashboards that will prove their worth in the next year will give marketers insight into the future of their brands using multidimensional data cubes that are more malleable, flexible, and better able to serve the needs of individual brands. There will be fewer dashboards, and they will not show you data. They will give you insight.

Neil Capel, CEO & Founder of Sailthru

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