"The Source of Truth” — The Dumbest Phrase in Marketing

💥"The Source of Truth” — The Dumbest Phrase in Marketing

Let’s be clear: there is no such thing as a “source of truth.”
There never has been.

It’s marketing jargon that needs to die — right next to “data-driven decisions” and “growth hacking.”
The people who say it the most usually have the least clue what their numbers actually mean.

The Great Lie

Marketers and analytics teams love saying it because it feels safe.
It sounds definitive, like there’s some sacred database somewhere that knows exactly what happened.

But there isn’t.
There’s just the least broken version of your best guess.

Every System Lies in Its Own Special Way

Some lie because they’re lazy.
Some lie because they’re blind.
Most lie because the people using them need to believe they’re right.

• GA4 lies by oversimplifying, sampling, and pretending broken sessions are “insights.” It’s the drunk friend who swears they remember everything from last night.

• HubSpot lies by repeating what people told you, not what they actually did. It’s the kid in class who copies your homework and calls it research.

• Meta and Google Ads lie by claiming credit for every sale they can sniff a pixel of — like two toddlers fighting over the same toy yelling “MINE!”

• Server-side and CAPI setups lie more efficiently, but make no mistake — they still lie. They just wear a cleaner suit while doing it.

Each one is just serving up its version of an estimate — a partial story told through biased math.
None of them are truth.
At best, they’re your main source of an estimate of what actually happened.

That’s it. That’s as close to “truth” as you’ll ever get.

The Real Problem

The phrase “source of truth” is how people justify turning off their brains.
It’s lazy shorthand for “we stopped questioning this.”
It’s what teams say when they want to look data-savvy without doing the hard part — understanding the limits of the data.

It’s the comfort blanket for people who can’t handle uncertainty.
A slogan for data cowards.

The truth isn’t in GA4, or HubSpot, or any dashboard.
The truth is in the mess — the cross-checking, the contradictions, the human context.
It’s in what repeats, what correlates, and what actually moves the damn needle.

What Actually Works

Stop looking for truth.
Start looking for patterns.
Start looking for what’s consistently useful.

The best marketers aren’t chasing “truth.”
They’re chasing clarity — and clarity only comes when you accept that every number is a half-truth stitched together with bias and hope.

So yeah, go ahead and pick your platform.
Call it your “primary data model.”
Call it your “best estimate.”
Hell, call it your “place we’ve all agreed to be wrong together.”

Just don’t call it truth.
You’re not building a religion.
You’re building a business.