Writing on marketing systems and decisions
Better Marketing Begins With Better Decisions.
Don Dodds is a marketing technologist and strategist. For thirty years he has built the systems behind marketing. The harder work is getting a company to explain its own results well enough to act on them.
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Forbes Agency Council
What a Marketing Operating System Looks Like in Practice
Most organizations have marketing components. Far fewer have a system. What separates them is…
July 14, 2026
Practice
The Decision Layer
Between the data a marketing organization collects and the choices it makes there is…
June 15, 2026
Forbes Agency Council
Marketing Growth Requires Transferable Intelligence
When what an organization knows lives inside individuals rather than inside a system, every…
May 29, 2026
Forbes Agency Council · Editor's Choice
The One Metric That Tells Clients Whether Their Marketing Is Actually Working
Reporting volume has never been higher. Understanding has never been rarer. What matters is not how much marketing produces, but whether the next decision is easier than the last.
The system does not eliminate uncertainty. It organizes it.
Read the executive summary
The Marketing Operating System
The philosophyEvery organization already researches markets, builds strategy, creates marketing, interprets performance and improves over time. The question is whether those five things happen across disconnected tools, or inside one connected system.
Don Dodds introduced PIEARM™ in 2015 to eliminate random acts of marketing. It is now the architecture underneath the operating system below.
01
Research
Uncover the opportunity. Audience, competition and demand, examined before the plan is written.
02
Strategy
Build the plan. Channel, content and budget settled before anything gets made.
03
Creation
Produce the marketing. Work that inherits the plan rather than reinterpreting it.
04
Intelligence
Explain the results. What changed, why it changed, and where the next opportunity sits.
05
Optimization
Decide what changes. Budget and priority move toward what the evidence supports.
Every cycle makes the next one smarter
Original research · Annual
The Marketing Decision Delta
Three questions, asked independently of four leaders inside the same organization. What changed. Why. What now. The distance between their answers is the finding.
See Decision Delta3 in 4
leadership teams give conflicting answers to why performance changed
1 in 9
answer all three questions with one voice
Illustrative. 2026 fieldwork opens in September.
The Body of Work
Research · Forbes Agency Council · Practice
Research
The Marketing Decision Delta
An annual measure of how well marketing organizations actually decide, built on three questions asked of four leaders inside the same company.
Annual · 2026
Forbes Agency Council
A standing column on search, systems and machine discovery
Forbes Agency Council writing since 2020, from technical SEO through entity optimization to marketing operating systems.
Since 2020
Practice
PIEARM and the methods built on it
The operating system, the Brand Profile, the decision layer, and the rules that decide what AI is allowed to say about a company. Written here in full, not summarized from somewhere else.
Canonical here
Ahead of the Market
See the full recordEach of these was acted on while the market was still deciding whether it mattered. The last one is not finished.
1998
Transitioned businesses from the Yellow Pages to the commercial web while directory publishers still dominated local advertising.
2005
Integrated analytics and conversion tracking into websites before data-driven marketing became common practice.
2013
Founded M16 Marketing as a strategy-led agency while much of the market kept selling disconnected services.
2023
Introduced PIEARM as the Marketing Operating System, connecting five stages into one cycle.
Next
Advancing Marketing Decision Intelligence through PIEARM as the next competitive advantage.
Once is luck · A pattern is a method
About Don Dodds
Every technology problem turned out to be a decision problem.
He built and exited two platforms, founded M16 Marketing® in 2013, and has worked through more than a thousand engagements since. Thirty years of putting work into the world and watching what came back.
What came back was rarely a technology problem. Capable teams with good tools could not say what had changed, why it changed, or what to do next. PIEARM and the Marketing Decision Delta are both answers to that.
Read the full story