There’s a Kevin O’Leary clip that does the rounds on LinkedIn every few months. In it, he describes working alongside Steve Jobs in the mid-nineties, when O’Leary’s educational software business was getting Macs into schools, and the rule Jobs ran his entire day on: signal to noise.

Jobs’s signal was the three to five things that had to get done in the next 18 hours. He wasn’t talking about the vision for next quarter, just the waking day in front of him. Anything that got in the way of those things was noise, and he held himself to roughly 80% signal, 20% noise. O’Leary’s response at the time, by his own account, was to call him an asshole. He then spent the next thirty years running his own days on the same rule, and telling anyone with a podcast about it¹. It fits the record, too: the year Jobs returned to Apple he told developers that focusing is about saying no, then cut the product line from hundreds of products to ten².

Jobs didn’t invent the idea, and neither did any business thinker. Signal-to-noise ratio is an engineering measurement, created because early radio and telephone engineers needed to know how much of what came out of the speaker was the broadcast and how much was interference. Claude Shannon built information theory on the distinction in 1948³. Nate Silver borrowed it for forecasting in 2012⁴. Somewhere along the way it became business folklore, with Jobs as its patron saint.

It stuck because everyone recognises the problem. Our view is that marketing has a worse case of it than any other department, for a reason that rarely gets said out loud. Marketing’s noise isn’t background interference. Most of it is manufactured by people who benefit from your attention.

The Noise Has a Business Model

An engineer’s noise comes from physics. Thermal interference, crossed frequencies, a dodgy cable. Irritating, but nobody profits from it.

A marketer’s noise is different, because most of it is produced commercially. Platforms report their own effectiveness, and every metric they surface doubles as an argument for spending more on that platform. Martech vendors sell measurement, and every dashboard quietly justifies its own licence fee. The trade press and the feed run on novelty, so every week brings a new tactic you’re apparently behind on and a new post explaining why everything you’re currently doing is over.

None of these parties is lying, exactly. None of them is neutral either. The result is noise engineered to look like signal, which is why “just focus” is thin advice for a CMO. The distraction is produced at industrial scale, and generative AI has now cut the cost of producing it to almost nothing. In engineering terms, the noise floor is rising.

(We’d add that every agency homepage promises to help you “cut through the noise”, a phrase that has itself become noise. We’re aware of the irony.)

What the Signal Actually Is

Jobs’s signal was a task list. For a marketing leader, we think it’s a short set of questions about demand:

• Is demand in our category growing or shrinking?
• What share of that demand do we hold, at each stage of the buying journey?
• Where is intent forming that we’re not present?
• Is this quarter’s activity creating new demand, or collecting demand that already existed?

If a metric helps answer one of those questions, it’s signal. If it doesn’t, it might still be interesting, but it shouldn’t set the plan. Most of what fills a standard marketing dashboard fails the test, for the reasons we covered in Marketer Math: ROAS, last-click conversions and CTR describe what got collected, and say very little about what got created. Almost all of it is also a record of what already happened.

This is the job Share of Intent, the measure at the centre of IntentOS, was designed for, and three properties make it a signal rather than one more metric. It looks forward: intent forms before purchase, so the share of your category’s intent you hold now is an early read on the market share you’ll hold later. It’s one number: the same measure across every digital channel, instead of a separate scorecard for search, social, retail media and whatever launches next quarter. And it connects to an outcome the rest of the business already tracks, which is your position in the market.

Cut Noise Before You Buy Signal

Here’s the detail from engineering that the business version forgets: it’s a ratio. You improve it by strengthening the signal or by reducing the noise, and reducing the noise is nearly always cheaper.

Marketing tends to do the opposite. Faced with an unclear decision, we buy more signal: another tool, another data source, another weekly report. Nate Silver’s warning applies here. Data grows far faster than the truth contained in it, so each new source tends to add more noise than signal, however much better it makes the dashboard look.

The cheap move is deletion. Start with the reports nobody reads, the metrics that haven’t changed a decision since they were added, and the standing meetings nobody can remember the purpose of. Removing them costs nothing, and the ratio improves the same day.

Filters Beat Willpower

O’Leary’s version of the discipline is personal. Pick three things, ignore the inbox. That works for one person’s calendar. It doesn’t work for a marketing department, because the noise arrives through the reporting stack itself, dressed as your own data.

Engineering solved this with filters, designed into the circuit so interference is removed before a human ever hears it. Nobody asked the radio operator to concentrate harder. Marketing needs the equivalent: a layer that sits between the raw data of your market and the decisions your team makes, and only passes through the things that should change the plan.

That’s the job IntentOS was built for. The Market Map shows where intent exists in your category, who holds it, and where it’s forming with nobody there to meet it. Share of Intent tracks whether you’re winning more of it over time. The rest stays out of the decision layer.

A Signal the Board Can Hear

There’s a cost to reporting noise, and marketing has been paying it for a decade. Just 3% of board members have a marketing background⁵. A third of the Fortune 500 no longer has a CMO at all, with the number of companies holding the role falling from 71% in 2023 to 66% in 2024⁶. Average CMO tenure across the S&P 500 sits at 4.1 years, against 7.6 for CEOs⁶. And when McKinsey asked CEOs and their CMOs to name the company’s top three marketing metrics, only half of the pairs gave the same answer⁷.

That last one is the tell. Boards run on market share, revenue and growth. Marketing reports in ROAS, CTR and engagement, so the CEO and the CMO are often listening to different frequencies entirely. When that happens, marketing gets treated as a cost line, and cost lines are the first thing a CFO trims.

A forward-looking measure of your share of the market’s demand changes the conversation, because it arrives in the language the board already speaks. It gives the CFO a number to interrogate and the CEO a growth indicator to plan against. The same research found that companies whose CEOs put marketing at the core of the growth strategy are twice as likely to grow at more than 5% a year⁷. For marketing leaders trying to get back into that conversation, this is the practical route: report a market signal the CEO can plan against, and keep the channel metrics inside the marketing team, where they’re actually useful.

Action for CMOs

• Write your signal down. Three to five numbers tied to demand and your share of it, on one page. That’s the set the board sees.
• Audit everything else. For each metric, report and standing meeting, name a decision it changed in the last quarter. If nobody can, cut it and see who notices.
• Treat platform-reported numbers as claims. They’re evidence from an interested party. Check them against something the platform doesn’t control.
• Ask Jobs’s question at planning. Which three things this quarter will grow future demand? Fund those before anything else.

Improve Your Ratio With IntentOS

IntentOS is our decision-making platform built for the AI era. It maps the real demand in your market, measures your Share of Intent at every stage of the buying journey, and keeps the metrics that were never going to change your plan out of the room.

Talk to us about building your Market Map, and hear what your market sounds like with the noise turned down.

Notes

1. Kevin O’Leary on Steve Jobs’s signal-to-noise rule: The Diary of a CEO podcast with Steven Bartlett; also interviews with Business Insider and The School of Hard Knocks. O’Leary worked alongside Jobs when The Learning Company partnered with Apple.
2. Steve Jobs, Apple Worldwide Developers Conference (1997): “focusing is about saying no”.
3. Claude Shannon, “A Mathematical Theory of Communication”, Bell System Technical Journal (1948).
4. Nate Silver, “The Signal and the Noise” (2012).
5. McKinsey & Company, “Marketing’s moment is now: The C-suite partnership to deliver on growth”.
6. Spencer Stuart, annual CMO tenure studies (2024 and 2025 editions), as reported by Marketing Dive and Adweek.
7. McKinsey & Company with the Association of National Advertisers, research on the CEO and CMO relationship (2023 to 2025).