The complexity in measurement ramps with the complexity of the channel. In this post, I’ll write a bit about an interpretation of systems thinking, and how I apply it to marketing and marketing modeling. We all seek to minimize complexity and maximize predictability. We want to minimize risk and maximize empowerment. We want to synthesize a huge amount of information and boil it down to a handful of levers. Levers cause empowerment and they enable people to make really good decisions. Systems thinking is an actual thing now. Some organizations already have models in place, and are all fairly standardized. Not every organization has them. Understanding them is pretty important. This is my approach: I write a load of variables[…]
Category: Uncategorized
The eMetrics NYC conference / data driven business week, is said to have attracted some 1600 people. The WAA Industry meeting coincided with it. It was a success. Three major takeaways that stick out in my mind. Janus Faces for Janus Audiences I’ve now seen two versions of Peter Fader. The academic Fader and the industry Fader. The one you see at an INFORMS Marketing Science conference is the academic Fader. He’s the kind of guy that’ll smile as he tells his skeptical detractors to take their perspectives and reconsider them. His insights into models and the way theories have been constructed are original. He doesn’t mess around with the bits at the edges. He’s good at the comparative method[…]
I wrote a definition of ‘Insight’ on December 29, 2010 that read: “An insight is: New information Executable Causes action Profitable Or, more detailed, an insight is: A piece of information that you didn’t know before, which – Can feasibly executed, culturally acceptable and of a scale relevant to the firm, and – Causes a decision to be made that wouldn’t have been made otherwise, and – Results in profit or a sustainable competitive advantage” If held to that standard, insights are incredibly rare. Depending on who you talk too, an insight may mean: A bullet point factoid An element that combines all that is known about a segment, compressed into the foundation what motivates and inspires them A simple[…]
We’re living in the most measured era in history. Are you the beneficiary of any of the data you’re generating? You optimize what you measure. One of the most data intensive self-improvement projects I undertook was in 2005. I recorded everything I ate and every exercise I did. And did I ever optimize – to the point where my joints couldn’t keep up with the muscle and bone growth. It was a massive amount of work to record all that detail, the weights of various things and then to cross reference with the USDA database. Then it all had to get loaded into SPSS for analysis. It was brutally time intensive. But it did generate incredible evidence-based insights about the[…]
This is a pretty good summary of the definition of data science. Some statisticians seem to be incensed. Some people say that this whole thing is invented as an O’Reilly buzzword. And there’s consternation, fear probably, over the devaluation of actual craft. Sound familiar? Ah, the great Web Analytics debate of 2007. Yes. We’ve seen this. Nothing like a fresh Gartner Hype Cycle in the morning, is there? But lets consider what technology is causing, and the role that data scientist will play, in driving that cause. Accessibility to data is expanding. What used to be the jealously guarded by people who didn’t want to be educators, is now liberally spread. It doesn’t really matter that most people don’t know[…]
Google Analytics Premium was announced today. Finally. It wasn’t really a secret. What do you get for an enterprise fee? Dedicated support, a number to call, no data caps, some attribution modeling (nice), and now, 50 custom variables. There’s good literature around disruptive innovation in web analytics, with a very specific vocabulary and model build around. Is this disruptive or incremental? The increase to 50 custom variables is purely an increment on an established dimension. Enterprise support is incremental from the previous version of support. They did have a type of support. It was vague. But it was there. So that’s an increment. Increasing data caps is incremental. The guarantees are incremental. There was protection in the past. There’s more[…]
A lot happened at the F8 developers conference last week, the most significant was changes to the Facebook GraphRank and the Social-Product Graph. Instead of offering a single degree of freedom, to ‘like’ anything or remain silent, it will be possible for people to state (verb) + (noun) something. I have ‘read’ + ‘this book’. I have ‘watched’ + ‘dexter’. I have ‘eaten’ + ‘breakfast’. And, I hope, I have ‘bought’ + ‘this phone’. This goes to the notion of ‘friction’. Frictionless The term ‘frictionless’ was used a lot at the conference and this has significance. Friction is resistance to sharing information. It’s caused by technology, experience interruptions, and by, yourself. Let’s start with you. There’s a pretty good model,[…]
“The future belongs to the companies and people that turn data into products.”– Mike Loukides, O’Reilly Radar, June 2010. One of my favourite thinkers, Mike Loukides, repeated and expanded on that today. And a good thing too. It’s not as though product development alone is easy. Even when armed with the tears of hundreds of thousands of developers as a reference guide, you’re bound to contribute several of your own to the corpus. Google Search is the most familiar example of turning data into product. And it has a few effects you know about. We all know several dozens of people who can explain SEO in high detail. I know only four people who can describe the mechanic behind PageRank[…]