The Data Will Only Take You So Far: What Marketers Are Missing About Their Audiences

At a Glance

• The argument: Data tells brands what their audiences look like. Brand experience reveals what they actually want.
• Why it matters now: As AI-generated content floods feeds and CRM-led marketing scales, the brands building durable equity are the ones still validating audience assumptions against real customer behavior.
• The proof points: Communities are self-organizing offline at scale. Creator networks are saturated. Net promoter score — recommendation, not purchase — remains the truest measure of whether the work landed.
• Source: Notes from Wait… Who Are You Even Talking To?, a panel convened by ADWEEK CEO Will Lee at ADWEEK House: POSSIBLE 2026, featuring Melissa Levy, President of Sparks, alongside leaders from Mars, AARP, Kepler Group, Hudson Yards Experiences, Fun.com, and Inmar Media.

Real people do not follow funnels. They do not stick to segments. They do not behave the way slide decks predict. They bounce, browse, spiral, and make purchase decisions on their own terms. The question every modern marketer is now confronting:

"Are we actually reaching our audience, or just a version of them that exists in our data?"

That tension was the subject of a recent panel at ADWEEK House: POSSIBLE 2026, convened by ADWEEK CEO Will Lee under the title Wait… Who Are You Even Talking To? Among the panelists was Melissa Levy, President of Sparks, alongside Adam Goldsmith of Inmar Media, Garrett Dale of Kepler Group, Kelsey Agostinelli of Mars, Gregg Molander of AARP, Greg Holtzman of Hudson Yards Experiences, and Mark Beatz of HalloweenCostumes.com. The discussion centered on the gap between what data tells brands about their customers and what those customers actually want — and across the conversation, Levy made the case that closing that gap is where brand experience has become a strategic necessity, not a marketing channel.

Where Data Ends, Presence Begins

The panel opened on a familiar problem. Data is fragmented, customer signals are siloed across platforms, and the layered audience profiles brands build can still miss the moment of decision. Goldsmith framed the opportunity around layering multiple data sources. Beatz described using Meta and TikTok creative as a targeting mechanism. Agostinelli pushed the conversation past talk-to into talk-with, arguing that authentic co-creation with consumers is what unlocks personalization at scale.

Levy took the argument a step further. "We can have all the data in the world, but until we're out there and seeing them in real life, we're missing it," she said. "It's really important to go old school and talk to your customers. Not just rely on the data."

Her point was not that data is wrong. It is that data is incomplete. The deeper a brand goes into its data layer, the more important it becomes to close the loop in person — to test what the segments say against what an actual customer does. That observation tracks with what we see in the brand experience work Sparks produces. Brand experience is increasingly the layer where audience strategy gets validated against reality — where assumptions baked into a media plan meet the person actually in the room.

The Scarcity of Connection

The conversation turned to communities, and Levy reframed what marketers are actually measuring when they talk about engagement.

Molander described an AARP newsletter and Facebook community for women over 60 that has produced in-person events in 48 states and DC — organic, audience-led, and impossible to manufacture from a media plan alone.

Levy's read on that example was that it is not an anomaly. It is signal. Audiences are actively sorting themselves into communities — online and in person — because connection has become scarce. The marketers who recognize that scarcity, and design experiences around it, are the ones building durable brand equity. The ones who try to engineer it from a dashboard are not.

Brand Fit Beats Reach

When the panel moved to creator strategy, Levy named the headwind directly. "With the millions of dollars being spent on social and content creation, it's so hard to cut through with all the AI-generated content out there," she said. "Influencer networks, you can buy across any segment. You've got to find the couple that really represent your brand. And it's getting harder."

The framing positioned the question as a brand integrity issue, not a media-buying one. The volume of synthetic content rising in social feeds is making the work of finding authentic creator voices harder, not easier — and the brands that get this right are the ones willing to be more selective, not less. Goldsmith made a parallel case for data-informed influencer curation, and Dale predicted that every scaled brand will operate a creator network within two years. Levy's argument held: the answer to a more saturated environment is sharper judgment, not bigger networks.

Loyalty Is the Real Proof

When Lee closed the panel by asking each panelist how they know they actually understand their customer, Levy returned to a foundational measure: net promoter score. The question of whether a customer would recommend a brand to someone else, she argued, remains the truest signal of whether the work has earned its audience. A purchase confirms a transaction. A recommendation confirms a relationship — and the brands building durable equity are the ones whose customers carry them forward.

In a session dominated by talk of AI discovery tools, generative engine search, and multi-source data layering, the closing argument landed on the fundamental: the data is the input. The recommendation is the proof.