Math Marketing: Excellent White Paper by Dimitri Maex
Mar 15, 2010 Industry News, Marketing And Advertising Analytics, Optimization, Statistics, Web Analytics
Dimitri Maex is the Managing Director Marketing Effectiveness at Ogilvy & Mather, and the author of a fantastic white paper that is posted HERE on the WPP website . What is so great about it is that it presents exactly what most companies need to know in order to get started in harnessing the full power of quantitative marketing methods, in a package that only takes about 15 minutes to read.
He starts with the history of quantitative marketing, gives a sense of the place of “math marketing” in the current business landscape, describes the types vendors with which a company can ally, and the wraps up with how a company should organize and hire to around the new skills and challenges peculiar to the coming era of quantitatively-driven marketing.
Some nits:
I don’t like the sound of the name “math marketing”. It’s just that the math doesn’t do any marketing – people still make the decisions and integrate the insights into their work, they just use data-based metrics and statistical techniques to assist them in getting a coherent picture of what is working and what isn’t, and formulating what might work in the future. It is probably also a terrible way to brand something you are selling to execs who mostly sucked at and avoided math in school. It’s like calling it “eat your vegetables marketing”.
The section on vendors is far from exhaustive. He leaves out SEM/SEO agencies in particular, and provides only the massive brand names in most of the categories he is describing. I guess Maex works for an ad agency – so he’s not responsible for selling you on his competition – but I’d look elsewhere for a buyer’s guide.
Whatever, he is right on the money about the current state of affairs and where most companies need to go.
He wraps with a couple of lists: Seven Steps to Increased Accountability, and Seven Steps to Increased Accountability to Transformational Consumer Insights.
This is a great document for business folk who want to understand the big picture of marketing analytics and quantitative marketing techniques, and want to understand how to manage them to best effect.
Tags: Data Mining, Dimitri Maex, Doubleclick, econometric models, Google Trends, Marketing Analytics, marketing mix models, Math Marketing, Microsoft, Ogilvy & Mather, quantitative marketing
Facebook Dominates Social Media Searches (Yet More Fun With Google Trends)
Jan 4, 2010 Industry News, Web Analytics
Playing with tools is fun – I did another Google Trends search, this time comparing “Facebook” to “MySpace”, “YouTube” and “LinkedIn” as reference points. Wow – searches for “Facebook” have really grown amazingly fast (see the first chart, below). I wish I had bought a piece of that company 2-3 years ago.
It occurred to me that there should be a corresponding trend in searches for “social networking”, relative to other online marketing activities (e.g., email, search, display advertising). Searches for “social networking” have had a huge growth rate, but the absolute volume turns out to be really small compared to “email” and “search”. I guess there is still time to get on that bandwagon. The search volume for “Facebook” crushes that for those terms, but this is made harder to interpret by the fact that these are much more likely to be searches by users, not just marketing professionals.
Tags: Bill Seely, Facebook, Google Trends, Graph, Keyword Search Frequency, Practical Marketing Analytics, Social Media
Search Volume for Analytics Ramping Up Steadily – (More Fun With Google Trends)
Jan 4, 2010 Industry News, Marketing And Advertising Analytics, Statistics, TV and iTV Analytics, Web Analytics
Just for fun, I did another Google Trends search, this time on “analytics” – adding “CRM” and “ERP” as reference points. The result seems to suggest that if you are in the business software market, that you should have an analytics offering. We’ll see, but I predict that the hot growth area in business software in 2010 will be Analytics. Searches for analytics have been steadily ramping up for the last several years, and are now at a higher level than searches for the above-mentioned enterprise business software categories.
I find it very interesting that searches for “ERP” and “CRM” have been flat for so long, but REALLY interesting that the volume of “analytics” searches surpassed them in 2009.
Tags: Analytics, Bill Seely, CRM, ERP, Google Trends, Graph, Keyword Search Frequency, Practical Marketing Analytics
Strong Seasonal Pattern Found in Search Data for Marketing Mix
Dec 21, 2009 Industry News, Marketing And Advertising Analytics
I guess it makes a kind of sense, but a search I did in Google Trends on the phrase “Marketing Mix” indicates that marketers are only interested in the topic during the colder months of the year. I guess once plans are submitted and budgets are approved, they have bigger fish to fry. Or maybe they are in the Hamptons. Take a look at the graph in the screenshot below – classic annual seasonality, right?
One of the changes I would expect to happen in the next few years, is that focus on marketing mix will become more continuous, and this graph will look more linear.
Tags: Bill Seely, Google Trends, Graph, Keyword Search Frequency, Marketing Mix, Practical Marketing Analytics, Seasonality