Every medium produces its own metric. The metric describes how the medium performed, and when the medium is dominant, the metric is useful. When the medium shifts, the metric keeps running. For a long time, nobody notices it has stopped describing anything.
TV ratings outlived their meaningful signal by at least a decade. The medium that produced them was appointment viewing. One household, one shared screen, one show chosen for the room. That medium eroded through DVR, streaming, cord-cutting, second-screening, aggregated streaming on devices Nielsen could not see. The number kept being compiled. Advertisers kept buying against it. The industry kept setting prices and careers to it. For a long time it was the most expensive hallucination in media.
Brand trackers do the same thing. They measure recall, awareness and consideration through surveys to panels. The medium that produced those measurements is a buyer who sees a few ads, remembers them a week later, says so on a form. That buyer still exists. They are no longer representative of the buying process. The buying process now runs through creator content, AI answers, review sites, Perplexity queries, group chats. The tracker still produces a number. The number still appears on a dashboard. It describes a world that has shrunk.
NPS does the same. The question presumed a buyer who recommended by voice, in a conversation. A meaningful share of recommendation now happens through LLM queries that never reach the respondent. The score moves. Nobody can tell whether it moved because the business did or because the medium did.
The metric lags the medium by about a decade. Then it is replaced, usually after the people who built careers on it have retired.
The useful question is not whether your metric is going up. It is whether the metric still describes the medium the buyer is in. If the buyer has moved and the number has not, the number is a comfort, not a signal.
Measure the medium.
Plan B works on the metrics that describe the medium your buyer is actually in. If the dashboard has stopped describing anything, get in touch.
