Is Data Science Killing Marketing?

Updated March 3, 2025

Reading Time: 2 minutes

Marketing Eating Itself

Marketing is constantly changing. In the last 20 years marketing has gone from “the people who drew our new logo” to being a revenue generation center, pulling leads into a company so their sales team can close deals. As this idea of ‘what a marketer does’ has evolved, so have the jobs the marketers are hired to do. Now typically you see two types of marketer, a creative, more traditional, marketer versus a data scientist. One creates visuals and copy, while the other looks at the data to see what is working and what isn’t. But as the role of the data scientist increases in importance, what does that mean for the creative marketer?

Sell, Sell, Sell!

Marketing has long been seen as a poor relation when compared to Sales. A company’s sales team is pulling in revenue and closing deals while the marketer is making a nice brochure. Obviously, I’m exaggerating to make a point, but the general attitude is still prevalent in many companies, with Marketers not often getting a seat in the executive suite. And of the CMOs that are around, very few making the step up to CEO.

But with the rise of online marketing, and the shifting sales cycle putting more onus on marketing to provide content for customers, things have begun to change. As the modern sales process is less Sales driven one, creating marketing materials, websites, blogging and other marketing tasks have been given more importance. So, in turn, has the marketer. However, as a side product of this, a new role has appeared. That of the data scientist.

Data Science

With more online marketing, comes more online marketing metrics and the more metrics you have, the more time you need to spend analyzing them. A good data scientist sees the matrix and can find the patterns in the data that show you where to spend more money. So because of that, the role of data scientist has also risen in importance. But with the recent announcement by UK based airline EasyJet that their head of marketing is being replaced by a Chief Data Officer does it signal the end of marketing’s time in the sun?

The Rise of the Scientist

Data science is intrinsically linked with figures, and there is no subjectivity about a CTR or a CLV. Because of that, perhaps a Chief Data Officer is more at home in the C- Suite dealing with the CFO and CSO. What do you think? Do you think that data science will overtake marketing in importance?