Will Your Lamppost Tell You It's Sh*t?

This week’s 2¢: Is your lamppost supporting a shit idea, or illuminating that it is one?

On the Rockstar CMO podcast this week, I was given the opportunity to trot out one of my favorite analogies for metrics:

A drunk leans against a lamppost for support, not illumination.

You know the sort of thing, finding metrics that support a point of view, or justify an activity, or, let’s be honest, justify the existence of something or (dare I say) someone.

And, before you start, it’s an affliction that’s not limited to marketing; it could be a founder depending on a nugget of data to inform a strategy or a sales leader clinging to a signal that gives them “happy ears” about a deal.

I’ve used this saying a lot, but never really given thought to its origin, apart from maybe hearing Scott Galloway say it once.

The quote is usually credited to Andrew Lang and apparently Ogilvy also leaned on it, but there’s an earlier version from 1903. A.E. Housman described someone who “uses texts much as a drunk man uses lamp-posts, not for the purpose of illumination, but to correct his instability”.

Yes, that language is dated, but I think “correct his instability” is better than “for support” as it pulls at something a bit deeper: insecurity.

A marketer leans on vanity metrics because they feel unsteady in the boardroom, and those metrics are nice, comfortable and secure.

And I am seeing that the vanity metrics are often a shared illusion across leadership; senior leaders are getting a bit tipsy on them, and it’s actually riskier to suggest that we need fewer hits, fewer followers, and fewer cold contacts to email at the top of the funnel and maybe be a bit more targeted. Everyone in the room knows (to quote Glengarry Glen Ross) that “the leads are weak”, but nobody wants to be the one to say it.

Nothing new here, this old drunk with his lamppost has been around throughout marketing history, but there is a new lamppost on the street (what Tuesday 2¢ would be complete in 2026 without it?): AI.

Here is this amazing tool for research and learning that could illuminate a content strategy, but it’s being used to pump slop to support an average one, informed by thin generic prompts driven by metrics of speed and volume, not relevance and engagement.

Plus, our robot LLM chums are built to be agreeable, so if you ask one to validate your content strategy, it will tell you it’s probably one of your best insights to date. A lamppost that not only provides support and corrects instability, but wraps comforting arms around us.

But the lamppost doesn’t decide how it’s used; the drunk does.

Whether it’s the comforting arms of your chosen AI assistant or those vanity metrics, if we are insecure, we’ll ask for the hug.

Popping the puff of vanity numbers, or asking an AI to tell us we’re wrong, takes a bit of steadiness, but then we could stop leaning, look up, and see the light (sorry, I couldn’t help myself).

When writing this, I asked, and I didn’t get a hug; it told me that if you spent 2¢ on my favorite analogy, you’d expect change.

So, ask AI what’s shit about this idea, because trust me, it will tell you.