Moneyball & Advertising
My friend Christien Louviere dropped me a tweet to check out Dan Greenfield’s post entitled On Baseball, Data and Social Media. If you haven’t read Michael Lewis’s Moneyball and you are a data nut, you should click over to Amazon or Barnes and Noble to order it. The book is a quick read and even though it’s not about digital media, it relates to many different industries and opportunities.
Dan does a good job in setting up the book and starts to relate it back to marketing.
In making their selections, the A’s crunched millions of bits of data, analyzing the outcomes of thousands of plays in a given game and in a given season. It’s the same approach we should be taking: looking at the connections among and interactions between individuals to understand innovation, collective decision making, and problem solving, and how the structure of organizations and social networks impacts these processes.
Dan also references Steve Rubel’s post entitled Moneyball Marketing.
I think both Dan and Steve are starting to lay the groundwork to where a big shift of advertising through digital channels is going. The way in which we mine data has only just begun and media planners will also double as analysts (or work alongside them) to look at audiences in a whole new capacity. Minimized wastage. Individualized impressions. Global frequency caps. Ad exchange and network management.
As we begin to find new ways to mine data and model it in new ways, advertising can and will become enhanced. This goes well beyond the way we serve advertisements as well – potentially the way we serve content (which and should be intertwined).