The challenge of obtaining and managing insight from unstructured information might be making a lot of marketers nauseous, but that’s nothing compared to the “data pukes” that are often brought before a company’s key decision makers, Google’s Avinash Kaushik told the Art of Marketing Toronto conference on Tuesday.
While the search engine giant employs many data science experts, Google’s digital marketing evangelist said it is important to distinguish between the level of proficiency in those staffers’ understanding of marketing data and the people who actually run businesses. His presentation included a slide that showed an inscrutable graph with numbers and lines that, to the naked eye at least, appeared meaningless.
“We take the people with the least amount of knowledge and we send them this piece of shit,” Kaushik said. “Say no to data pukes.”
Instead, marketers need to sift through information and focus on data that offers one of three things: insights about what’s going on, actions that the company should take, or the impact that a particular force is having on the business. He showed an example of where a company was measuring the number of pages per session in a digital marketing campaign – a fairly standard practice – versus measuring the “goal value,” or how close the campaign was reaching its goal, per session.
“That first job? That’s $15 an hour work. The second one is thousands-of-dollars-an-hour work,” he said.
The problem is that working with data may require more innovative approaches than marketers have pursued in the past. According to Stephen Shapiro, author of Best Practices Are Stupid, that’s a lot tougher than it sounds.
“Expertise is the enemy of innovation,” he said during his keynote session. “Our brain is wired for survival, so it assumes that everything you did prior to showing up to this event kept you alive. Therefore, those were all good things to do. If you continue to do those, you will stay alive.”
Shapiro recommended five “Ds” that brands should use to differentiate themselves. These include being distinctive from others in the market, defensible from traditional competitors, “disruption-proof” to the Ubers of the world, desirable to customers and easily disseminated to wherever customers are.
Kaushik offered similar advice, suggesting that markets should pay attention to all things digital and mobile; what customers see, think, say and do; developing content and measuring it appropriately. The key, Shapiro added, is recognizing that it’s customers who wind up shaping how a brand is perceived, more than the brand itself.
“Marketing is about creating a conversation in the marketplace where you are recognized,” he said.
The Art of Marketing ran June 14 at the Metro Toronto Convention Centre.
