To most, it might seem like a lot of inside pool. And I suppose most of these things are.

I want to talk a little bit about some of that inside pool.

Over the course of my WAA Research Committee work last week, I stumbled upon a paper entitled “Assumptions, Explanations, and Prediction in Marketing Science: “It’s the Findings, Stupid, Not the Assumptions” by Eric W. K. Tsang.

In it, he replies to a debate that’s been going on for a long time, but what natural scientists had settled a hundred years ago. Richard Staelin back in 1998 said that there’d always be debates about whether analytical models needed to have realistic assumptions or not. Shugan came out in 2007 and argued that it wasn’t about the assumptions. I can remember reading that paper back then. It had an effect on me. Let’s fast forward to 2009.

I don’t quite know how it happened, but I ended up sitting at a table with the megastars of Marketing Science research at an informs conference. Dr. Lehmann was there – as was Dr. James Lattin. From what I gather – they’re pretty distinguished researchers. I didn’t know it at the time, and I doubt that it would have changed my behavior much. Maybe only outliers would ever dare sit with that group. That’s how I met Alex.

Two outliers at a table of high insiders.

Alex is an economist out France. I won’t go so far as to call him a French Economist, but, regardless, there it is. We got into a discussion about how irritated I was with stupid assumptions.  I understood that without invalid assumptions that the math wouldn’t work: but maybe there’s no value in the math that doesn’t work. That unless I could use the model to understand the world, or at very maximum: predict the future in some way – that wasn’t of any use to a practitioner or to a scientist. Alex explained to me that the Math unto itself could help science chip away at the edges of complexity – and if something adds understanding, then it is of value: but maybe not to a practitioner.

I still accept where Alex comes from. I think there’s a role for trying to understand complexity by way of deliberate simplification. How those assumptions get selected still bothered me, and I continued to want to shout down anybody who had selected, in my judgement, a stupid assumption for such little gained value.

Back to Tsang, in his paper, where he takes Shugan on. Apparently there’s an entire school of thought that dismisses my belief that science should have at least a goal in making accurate predictions about the future. Tsang carefully deconstructs Shugan’s 2007 arguement, and in the end concludes that “although Shugan (2007) rightly stresses that it is inappropriate to dismiss a model or a theory based only the realism of its assumptions, realism does matter, and it matters a great deal for model building and theory development.”

And I happen to agree with Tsang. He’s helped me immensely in being able to reconcile some of that inside pool.

A lot of the inside pool going on right now in Web Analytics is very similar to Tsang-Shugan and Christopher-Alex. There are huge disconnects between what many web analytics practitioners want analytics to be, what some of the industry titans want it to be, what customers of web analytics outputs want it to be, and even within the broader analytics community (data miners, revenue managers, and market researchers are in the same neighborhood) want it to be.

All this – within an industry that couldn’t possibly employ more than 50,000 people in total.

Inside pool is important because it’s about values and refining the definitions that are in use by a community.

Trailer below

The series is from the Australian Broadcasting Corporation (ABC), which made for a difficult user journey in finding it.

I first saw Summer Heights High on Air Canada flights during the month of September. They showed the first 2 episodes. I loved it.

So, I looked it up on iTunes. Couldn’t find it. Then I looked it up on the interwebs and tried to find a nice way of watching it online. Couldn’t find a good enough source. Then I did more digging and found that HBO had bought the North American rights. (I didn’t know that this paradigm still existed, it’s kind of quaint).

So then I looked it up on Amazon and HMV – and opted to go grab it in person.

When you consider the amount of friction: from discovery to consumption – it’s little wonder that most people would have just opted to use Bit Torrent. I’m not quite certain what motivated me to actually walk to the flagship store. And reflecting back on the experience – I suppose HBO is getting what it really deserves. (that is: a 99.999% conversion drop off rate).

In sum, there were multi-channel wins and channel fails.

Alright – about the show

Chris Lilley is the kind of writer that Canada wish it had and wished that it could keep him from leaving for Los Angeles to make 10 times more money to write scripts that never come to life.

The whole series is 8 episodes. It’s wonderfully plotted. Brilliant.

Lilley forces his audience to empathize with three unsympathetic archetypes in a junior/high school: the bully, the wealthy private school valley, and the delusional educator. All three characters exaggerate specific features of those archetypes.

What all three share is this type of incredible manipulation, which, especially by the eighth episode becomes truly epic and tragic.

There are several lines which are meme-worthy.

What can Canadian Producers and Broadcasters could learn?

1. Distribution channels

Selling to a closed distributor might not be the best way to go to maximize revenues. The viral quality of Summer Heights High could have made the iTunes channel very lucrative, especially internationally. This could have been a great series for the CBC and the Beeb. HBO doesn’t appear to be a good channel if they’re making it so hard for people to actually see the show.

2. Creative Freedom

It doesn’t appear as though there was much interference with Chris Lilley’s concept. So, we have a brilliant writer and actor who has more freedom than what he’d get in Hollywood, but at the cost of money. I wonder whether or not such a model might be key in retaining good writers and actors in Canada. What we lack in money we can make up in relative freedom. Clearly a much better product emerged here and Chris could have been well rewarded with a large cut of the International sales.

In all, it’s a really good series. You should watch it if you can find it!