I live and work at one of the most amazing intersections. It’s also the cause of why things don’t mean what people assume that they mean. There are technologists – developers and computer scientists – who grapple with the limitations imposed by API’s and big data. There are marketing scientists – analysts and statisticians – who grapple with the limitations imposed by computability and understandability. There are marketers – brand and channel – who grapple with the limitations imposed by budget and cognitive surplus. It’s pretty amazing how a technologist, a marketing scientist, and a marketer can all be right within their own silo, their own way of thinking, but collectively be misunderstood and wrong. The confluence of all three[…]
It’s an annual tradition. We navel gaze. Every December. It’s as predictable as the tides. So, let’s talk 2012. A Forrester author, Joe Stanhope, asked us what we wanted to be when we grew up. I replied, ‘doing something meaningful’, or something to that effect. I meant it. Let’s consider something really meaningful that’s happening right now. Joe painted a picture of accelerating medium fragmentation and bloatware trying to keep up. Indeed, I’m encountering more analysts gathering the pitchforks against the new-new media. After all, if we can’t even do x right, what business do they have to even attempt y? Because it’s there. It’s never been a better time to be a marketing scientist or an analyst. It’s never[…]
Danny Sullivan wrote a pretty good blog post about an article getting deleted. You can read it here. I’m not so interested or outraged about it. This spawned a Hacker News thread. You can read the whole thing here. The comment I want to draw attention to comes to us from Phil Welch. It’s so good that I’m quoting it below. “Turns out if you throw together a few thousand neckbeards and convince them to play status games around building an encyclopedia, you get an encyclopedia. You also get a whole lot of stupid politics, wasted energy, process wanking, flamewars, and acronym-laden cryptic discourses where words like “arbitration” have strange, Orwellian connotations. (“Arbitration” is Wikipedia’s name for the process governing,[…]
Predictive analytics is somewhat mysterious. So, let’s shed some light on it. (Note that I’m simplifying this quite a bit to be accessible.) The first step in predictive analytics is to understand what you’re predicting. We’ll call this the Y variable. In this instance, ‘how many visits from Boston can I expect on a given day’. My Y will be ‘Visits’. I’m curious about it. Have some discipline. I see way too many analysts change the Y variable before their investigation is through. The second step is to identify all the variables that might be associated with a variation in Y. These might include factors like paid media, search, new visits, returning visits – and date. Then there are paid[…]
Gary Morgenthaler had a few interesting statements to make: “Therefore, when Siri was an independent company, its plan was to map these domains deeply and seamlessly to automate transactions for its users within them. For example, “Buy that Steve Jobs biography book and send it to my dad”; “Send a dozen yellow roses to my wife”; “Book me the usual table for 2 tonight at 8 p.m. at Giovanni’s”; and “Get me 2 box seats for the Giants game on Saturday.” Then comes the question of what solves our biggest problems. Ultimately, Siri’s value is that of automation and removing “friction” on the Internet. Siri achieves this by: (1) understanding speech input in natural language form, (2) mapping user requests[…]
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Joe Stanhope wrote a good piece for Forrester. If you have a subscription to Forrester, read it. It summarizes the state we’re in, and has a few very good points on the last page. In that piece, web analysts themselves list ‘attribution’ as a major challenge. This is a wicked problem. All the energy you put into untying that knot only causes it to become tighter. But let’s try this again, together. If you haven’t seen this previous post, it’s new to you. I drew out a conceptual model report, in part to demonstrate how cause-effect can be embedded into a report. Alright – so that’s a conceptual model. I believe that paid spend causes paid visits. I believe that[…]
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[…]
Data Science is the mix of computer science, user experience, and statistics. The aim of data science should be: to make things better by influencing people and things to make better decisions, by making people and things more aware of better alternatives, based on better algorithms and more relevant data. Language kept intentionally vague to set up the ‘well that could be anything’ argument when it suits me later. If you do it right, nobody is really aware of the complexity of what just happened to them. The point is not to experience data. The point is to experience…an experience. And be better off for it! And, the most interesting part is that it’s not really driven by humans with[…]
How consumers are using mobile to shop IRL (In Real Life) is of paramount interest now that mobile has finally arrived. A few figures to run through. The first, below, describes what consumers report they want from mobile phone applications, for the holidays, in August 2011. A common behavior, well known to clicks-and-bricks retailers, is that consumers will research products before coming in store to buy them. This is especially true of electronics goods, but I suppose it’s conceivable they do it for home appliances, automotive purchases, and anything else that is generally of high consideration. Mobile offers the capability of researching while you’re physically in the store. And, since most stores are now ghost towns, it enables the consumer[…]