Demystifying Data Science, Part I: What is Data Science?

Reading Time: 5 minutes

There’s a lot of buzz about Data Science these days, and especially its super-cool subfield, Machine Learning. Data Scientists have become the unicorns of the tech industry, commanding astronomical salaries and an equal amount of awe (and envy) to go with them. Partly as a result of this, the field has developed something of a mystical aura – the sense that not only is it complex, it’s too complex to explain to mere mortals, such as managers or business stakeholders.

It’s true that mastery of Data Science involves many complex and specialized activities, but it’s by no means impossible for a non-Data Scientist to build a good understanding of the main building blocks of the field, and how they fit together.

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Does your marketing need a customer graph?

Reading Time: 8 minutes

The relentless rise of social networks in recent years has made many marketers familiar with the concept of the social graph—data about how people are connected to one another—and its power in a marketing context.

Facebook’s social graph has propelled it to a projected annual revenue of around $40B for 2017, driven primarily by advertising sales. Advertisers are prepared to pay a premium for the advanced targeting capabilities that the graph enables, especially when combined with their own customer data; these capabilities will enable Facebook to snag over 20% of digital ad spend in the US this year.

Partly as a result of this, many marketers are thinking about how they can exploit the connectedness of their own customer base, beyond simple “refer a friend” campaigns. Additionally, it’s very common to hear marketing services outfits tack the term graph onto any discussion of user or customer data, leading one to conclude that any marketing organization worth its salt simply must have a graph database.

But what is a graph, and how is it different from a plain old customer database? And if you don’t have a customer graph in your organization, should you get one?

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AI and The Electrification of Marketing

Reading Time: 5 minutes

At the end of the nineteenth century, electricity was starting to have a profound effect on the world. As dramatized in the excellent novel The Last Days of Night, Thomas Edison battled with George Westinghouse (the latter aided by Croatian genius/madman Nikola Tesla) for control over the burgeoning market for electricity generation and supply. The popular symbol of the electrical revolution is of course Edison’s famous light bulb, but almost more important was the humble electric motor.

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Is Digital Marketing having its ‘Deep Blue’ moment?

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Garry Kasparov will forever be remembered as perhaps the greatest chess player of all time, dominating the game for almost twenty years until his retirement in 2005. But ironically he may be best remembered for the match he failed to win twenty years ago in 1997 against IBM’s Deep Blue chess computer. That watershed moment – marking the point at which computers effectively surpassed humans in chess-playing ability – prompted much speculation and hand-wringing about the coming obsolescence of the human brain, now that a mere computer had been able to beat the best chess grandmaster in the world.

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What’s next for the Digital Analytics Association?

Reading Time: 3 minutes

I’ve been a member of the Digital Analytics Association for, it turns out, about twelve years – over half my professional life. In that time I’ve seen the organization grow and blossom into a vibrant community of professionals who are passionate about the work they do and about helping others to develop their own skills … Read more

6 steps to building your Marketing Data Strategy

Reading Time: 11 minutes

Your company has a Marketing Strategy, right? It’s that set of 102 slides presented by the CMO at the offsite last quarter, immediately after lunch on the second day, the session you may have nodded off in (it’s ok, nobody noticed. Probably). It was the one that talked about customer personas and brand positioning and … Read more

Got a DMP coming in? Pick up your underwear

Reading Time: 6 minutes

If you’re like me, and have succumbed to the unpardonably bourgeois luxury of hiring a cleaner, then you may also have found yourself running around your house before the cleaner comes, picking up stray items of laundry and frantically doing the dishes. Much of this is motivated by “cleaner guilt”, but there is a more … Read more

The seven people you need on your data team

Reading Time: 8 minutes

Congratulations! You just got the call – you’ve been asked to start a data team to extract valuable customer insights from your product usage, improve your company’s marketing effectiveness, or make your boss look all “data-savvy” (hopefully not just the last one of these). And even better, you’ve been given carte blanche to go hire … Read more