I've written a short book. It's called "Pragmalytics: Practical Approaches to Marketing Analytics in the Digital Age". It's a collection and synthesis of some of the things I've learned over the last several years about how to take better advantage of data (Big and little) to make better marketing decisions, and to get better returns on your investments in this area.
The main point of the book is the need for orchestration. I see too much of the focus today on "If we build It (the Big Data Machine, with some data scientist high priests to look after it), good things will happen." My experience has been that you need to get "ecosystemic conditions" in balance to get value. You need to agree on where to focus. You need to get access to the data. You need to have the operational flexibility to act on any insights. And, you need to cultivate an "analytic marketer" mindset in your broader marketing team that blends perspectives, rather than cultivating an elite but blinkered cadre of "marketing analysts". Over the next few weeks, I'll further outline some of what's in the book in a few posts here on my blog.
I'm really grateful to the folks who were kind enough to help me with the book. The list includes: Mike Bernstein, Tip Clifton, Susan Ellerin, Ann Hackett, Perry Hewitt, Jeff Hupe, Ben Kline, Janelle Leonard, Sam Mawn-Mahlau, Bob Neuhaus, Judah Phillips, Trish Gorman Clifford, Rob Schmults, Michelle Seaton, Tad Staley, and my business partner, Jamie Schein. As I said in the book, if you like any of it, they get credit for salvaging it. The rest -- including several bits that even on the thousandth reading still aren't as clear as they should be, plus a couple of typos I need to fix -- are entirely my responsibility.
I'm also grateful to the wonderful firms and colleagues and clients I've had the good fortune to work for and with. I've named the ones I can, but in general have erred on the side of respecting their privacy and confidentiality where the work isn't otherwise in the public domain. To all of them: Thank You!
This field is evolving quickly in some ways, but there are also some timeless principles that apply to it. So, there are bits of the book that I'm sure won't age well (including some that are already obsolete), but others that I hope might. While I'm not one of those coveted Data Scientists by training, I'm deep into this stuff on a regular basis at whatever level is necessary to get a positive return from the effort. So if you're looking for a book on selecting an appropriate regression technique, or tuning Hadoop, you won't find that here, but if you're looking for a book about how to keep all the balls in the air (and in your brain), it might be useful to you. It's purposefully short -- about half the length of a typical business book. My mental model was to make it about as thick as "The Elements of Style", since that's something I use a lot (though you probably won't think so!). Plus, it's organized so you can jump in anywhere and snack as you wish, since this stuff can be toxic in large doses.
In writing it amidst all the Big Data craziness, I was reminded of Gandhi's saying (paraphrased) "First they ignore you... then they fight you, then you win." Having been in the world of marketing analytics now for a while, it seems appropriate to say that "First they ignore you, then they hype you, then you blend in." We're now in the "hype" phase. Not a day goes by without some big piece in the media about Big Data or Data Scientists (who now have hit the highly symbolic "$300k" salary benchmark -- and last time we saw it, in the middle part of the last decade in the online ad sales world, was a sell signal BTW). "Pragmalytics" is more about the "blend in" phase, when all this "cool" stuff is more a part of the furniture that needs to work in harmony with the rest of the operation to make a difference.
"Pragmalytics" is available via Amazon (among other places). If you read it please do me a favor and rate and review it, or even better, please get in touch if you have questions or suggestions for improving it. FWIW, any earnings from it will go to Nashoba Learning Group (a school for kids with autism and related disorders).
Where it makes sense, I'd be very pleased to come talk to you and your colleagues about the ideas in the book and how to apply them, and possibly to explore working together. Also, in a triumph of Hope over Experience, my next book (starting now) will be a collection and synthesis of interviews with other senior marketing executives trying to put Big Data to work. So if you would be interested in sharing some experiences, or know folks who would, I'd love to talk.
About the cover: it's meant to convey the harmonious convergence of "Mars", "Venus", and "Earth" mindsets: that is, a blend of analytic acuity, creativity and communication ability, and practicality and results-orientation that we try to bring to our work. Fellow nerds will appreciate that it's a Cumulative Distribution Function where the exponent is, in a nod to an example in the book, 1.007.
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