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 ethics of efficiency

There’s a paragraph in “Queuing conundrums” in the September 13th issue of The Economist that gave me pause and made me reflect on the role of the state and, more specifically, the ends towards which the state’s activities are directed:

The researchers [three physicists] looked at how this equilibrium ["what game theory calls a Nash equilibrium" ... "the point where no individual driver could arrive any faster by switching routes"] could arise is travelling across Boston from Harvard Square to Boston Common.  They analysed 246 different links in the road network that could be used for the journey and calculated traffic flows at different volumes to produce what they call a “price of anarchy” (POA).  This is the ratio of the total cost of the Nash equilibrium to the total cost of an optimal traffic flow directed by an omniscient traffic controller.  In Boston they found that at high traffic levels drivers face a POA which results in journey times 30% longer than if motorists were co-ordinated into an optimal traffic flow.  Much the same thing wa found in London (a POA of up to 24% for journeys between Borough and Farringdon Underground stations) and New York (a POA of up to 28% from Washington Market Park to Queens Midtown Tunnel).

I like how the delta used here is one baselined against the Nash equilibrium but I wonder if each and every driver suffered a POA, or if the numbers mentioned are in aggregate.  Did anyone save time?  Or does everyone suffer without Big Brother Traffic Controller?

I noticed this blurb as over the past few months I’ve been struggling in the back of my head with notions of a regulatory state and its Efficiency Imperative. Is it okay to impose artificial constructs onto the marketplace if the goal is a more efficient market? This is what Glaeser seems to argue in The Rise of the Regulatory State. At the time, I read it and thought, “Okay, yeah, maybe, I like efficiency.”

But then, I thought, “Wait a second.  Efficiency for whom and at what cost?”

I’m thinking about the fact that my default experience in school, pre-Academy, and in the workplace, excluding Blink and the Terrence Thomas Era, has been one of exclusion and limitation.  Which is to say:  I was excluded from the benefits accorded to the majority and asked to, in one way or another, limit my talents so that I didn’t disrupt the classroom / make people in the office feel dumb.  (I should probably put that last part in quotation marks as it’s not a paraphrase.)  I was asked to hold myself back and not perform at my top levels for the sake of the efficient functioning of the enterprise as a whole.

Which makes me think:  efficiency is great, in theory.  You sum things up, and then you perform an optimization process, bodda bing.  But this is so State Enterprise, so Stalin, so Hegel-revolutionary-history.  This is communism!  Why not optimize for each unit and then sum?  That is, instead of

Optimize sum of units

why not

Sum optimized units

???

Seems the communist, I mean regulatory, state seems to be horny for the former, whereas I’m feeling the latter.  Hence my take on libertarian maternalism:  I want to market optimized decision-making at the individual, unit level.  Very targeted marketing.  Not blanket policies that apply to all in all situations.  But intelligently engineered (sorry; eat it ;) human-centered programmes (I’m feeling a mite The Economist at the moment, Sirs) that optimize units, so that society, in its sum, kicks more ass than ever.

Without forcing me to bind my wings.

(Hmm, equation to prove:  is “sum optimized units” > “optimized sum of units”?)

That said, I’m still working things out in my head, and am open to different takes on this.

What say you in the matter of being bossed around and told what to do for the sake of an efficient state?