Smart data, friction, and the power of prediction
Marketing measurement should be viewed as a creative act, rather than falling into a yes culture. Jordan Taylor-Bartels, CEO of commercial mix modelling company Prophet, explains how data should challenge and provoke organisations to look into the future with clearer insights.
The modern organisation has a curious relationship with its own data. Many are drowning in it, yet few use it to do more than track last quarter’s performance.
Marketing measurement, in particular, seems obsessed with dashboards that confirm what we already suspect, rather than inspiring us to break new ground. As a result, decision-makers chase the approval of the board or the status quo, while ignoring insights that might actually illuminate a different path.
Yet friction is essential to real progress. Look at Netflix, which once mailed DVDs (at least in the US) to customers and faced friction internally when pivoting to streaming. Some executives worried about cannibalising existing revenues, while others warned that customers were not “ready.” But that spark of conflict forced Netflix to confront the limits of its own assumptions and move toward a model that reshaped an entire industry. Without friction, Netflix might still be a postage-based business rather than the media behemoth we know today.
good view, and (actually) really well articulated – but feels like this needs to be said one-to-one to ceo’s not just an opinion piece on mumbrella…