Unearthing the non-obvious marketing relationships.
As you know, I’m obsessed by the way data reveal relationships that normally aren’t obvious and changes how we look at the world. Recently, a few more examples have popped up in my reading materials. First was Nurtureshock which I found fascinating. Using data from large studies, they’ve started to overturn a bunch of long-held beliefs about raising children (which also highlights another favorite theme, how we often make the wrong decisions).
On a lighter note, you probably caught this analysis on profile pics done by dating site OkCupid which revealed some pretty interesting and very funny stats on the effectiveness of different poses and facial expressions on profile pics for men and women.
It’s clear our ability to measure more accurately is changing how we look at the world. That’s why I found this article about the fact that “Intel has launched an internally developed program it calls the Value Point System to measure marketing effectiveness online,” very interesting.
According to Nancy Bhagat, Intel VP-sales and marketing group, and director-marketing strategies and campaigns, “The opportunity that online represents for us is to be able to really take a look at numbers and data to help evaluate the value we’re getting.”
Given that Intel reportedly spends around $300 million on ads per year and that it had projected online in 2009 to be around 50% of its budget, that would make for a lot of really interesting data that they will be collecting and crunching through. It will be really interesting to see what they turn up and how open they are about sharing that information.
