Buddhist Marketer

Silos Are Optimization Killers

From an interview at AdExchanger with all around good guy Tim Ogilvie (9Y7), CEO of AdBuyer.com, an online media buying platform that optimizes your campaigns while you eat fried chicken:

Successful online marketing is about building lots of 5% and 10% improvements into a commanding lead. Most marketers that we talk to are drowning in data, but can’t act on that data because they’re overwhelmed or the data lives in different silos. We’ve built a platform that puts all the data in one place, makes it easy to identify improvement opportunities and just as easy to act on them.

Yes.  I mean, maybe it’s communist when you’re talking about humans, but

f’(x) + g’(x)

is an inferior approach to marketing optimization versus

the optimized sum (f(x) + g(x)).

Or something like that.  (It’s been, like, sixteen years since I’ve had calculus and stuff.)

Go AdBuyer!

The Royal We Interrupts This Program

Can I just say how much I love blueprinting processes and data flows?

That is all.  Back to engineering some raw data.

Why I won’t cancel my Dopplr account

The first sentence of a 12/18/2008 email from Dopplr, subject line

You took 12 trips to 9 cities in 2008. Personal annual report coming soon.

reads

One of the most popular requests we’ve had from our travellers is for Dopplr to summarise your year of travel in the form of data and graphs. So that’s exactly what we’ll do. We’ll be sending you your personal annual report in January.

to which I must say, “Oh yes.  Data, baby,” followed by, “Wait, is Dopplr Brit?”

(Turns out they have core members in both Helsinki and London.)

(This reminds me of the year-end summary of charges a la American Express.  When I was at Citi I wanted to create a card that had a purchase-data RSS feed for cardholders, in case they wanted to create a blog badge of stuff they were buying as they bought it (and/or run their own data analysis).  (Of course I wanted to tie in some rev-share as well on top of it.)  I do think that the me-ness of society — perhaps in opposition to the grammatical fiction of the I of the totalitarian regimes of societies past (see Rubashov in Koestler’s Darkness at Noon) — will continue to desire services such as self-reflective, self-affirming data feeds.  All your 10101010110 are belong to … you!)

The “writing” ? “data-munching” unifying equation

From the latest ish of Wired:

Language is one of the best data-compression mechanisms we have. The information contained in literature, or even email, encodes our identity as human beings.

- Martin Wattenberg, the mathemagician and computer scientist who birthed NameVoyager