Marketers fall for the streetlight effect

There are more things in the buyer's journey than are dreamt of in your tracking system. 

Illustration of the streetlight effect or the drunkard's search

The mistake marketers, especially SaaS B2B marketers, make in focusing on what is easy to measure rather than on what is truly meaningful reminds me of an old joke that has gained the distinction of the name "the drunkard's search" or the streetlight effect."

It goes like this:

A police officer sees a drunken man searching the ground under a streetlight. He asks what he's looking for, and the man answers that he dropped his wallet (or a quarter or keys in some versions).

The policeman aids him in the search for a few minute but doesn't find anything. He then ask the man if he's certain he dropped it there.

No, he said, he dropped the wallet across the street.

"Then why are you looking here?"
“The light is better on this side." 

In the same way, B2B marketers go for the light -- whatever is easily tracked -- even if the key information like what really made an impression on the customer cannot be found in the click stats and the like. The actual trigger that converted the prospect into a customer may not be something you sent at all but a recommendation on a review site or even one given orally by a friend. 

But you wouldn't likely discover that if you limit your understanding to what your analytics tell you about your site, blog, and social media content. 

Related:

Visualizing the customer journey

How content marketing keeps it Rrreal

What the Little Prince teaches us about marketing

How to get everything wrong in a pitch

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When two screens are better than one

In the last century, people who would plan what to watch on TV would turn to printed guides. Thanks to the proliferation of channels and the rise of streaming services, they have a lot more options to choose from. But this brave new world also opens up new ways for marketers to reach the audiences that will lift viewership. 

A  leader in global TV analytics, Samba TV, connects data on viewership with cross-screen ad exposure to helps programmers measure and optimize tune-in campaign performance. Toward that end it draws on partnerships for insight into what viewers are tuning into on their second screen. 

TV and digital are better together, says cross-screen analytics leader Samba TV.

Read more in 

Second Screen Synergy for TV Marketing

Extracting marketing value from data

As businesses strive to become more data-driven, the challenge lies not amassing data for
data's sale, but in getting the right data.

According to research from Harvard Business Review, data records are so prone to critical errors that less than three percent of data meets basic quality standards. Accuracy matters, and banking on the wrong data can translate into serious business losses. In 2016 IBM estimated that losses due to poor data quality cost the US economy $3.1 trillion annually

Gary Read, CEO of Import.io, a web data integration solution provider, spoke about how his business gathers data from publicly available websites and puts it into a common format to enable organizations to gain insights that can inform their marketing strategy.  What Import.io does is take care of the data so that businesses can focus on the insights.

Read more in 

Tapping Data for Marketing Insights

Got sarcasm?

I'm being sarcastic." We've all had at least one exchange in which we either had to explain or had someone else explain that what was said was not intended to be taken straight. Generally, you need to know something about both the context and the speaker to grasp when to take a statement at face value or interpret it as sarcastic.

That's why it's particularly challenging to get handle on intent when attempting sentiment analytics on social media. For artificial intelligence to truly understand what humans mean, it needs emotional intelligence, as well. Iyad Rahwan, an associate professor the MIT Media lab and one of his students, who developed the algorithm with one of, Bjarke Felbo worked on just that.

The results are what they call Deep Moji. Described as "artificial emotional intelligence," Deep Moji was trained on millions of emojis "to understand emotions and sarcasm." Rahwan explained to MIT's Technology Review that in the context of online communication emojis take on the function of body language or tone in offering nonverbal cues for meaning.

Read more in Emojis Train AI to Recognize Sarcasm

AI for Customized Consumer Communication

As AI advances, it's reshaping marketing with new ways of pulling in data and insights to reshape and customize consumer communication. Its impact on marketing was explored in a recent NYC Media Lab white paper, "How AI Is Changing Media Economics."

 Now it's possible to apply real time analytics to a campaign that is tested, tweaked, and tailored to an audience. 
Read more in 

AI: The Ultimate Game-Changer for Media

Getting kids back to school with clean clothes

photo: https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/1/1c/Modern_front_load_tumble_dryer.JPG/460px-Modern_front_load_tumble_dryer.JPG

Back-to-school season is upon us. Many students will resume their studies in
August, and some may need extra help of one form or another to make the academic year a success.

School success begins with student attendance. Absent students can't learn that day's lesson, and those students are most likely fall behind in their work. While some absences are unavoidable, there are times when what holds students back is just not having clean clothes to wear, according to appliance maker Whirlpool. The company has created a program called Whirlpool Care Counts to put washers and dryers in schools to help address the issue of absenteeism due to lack of clean clothes and is now collecting data on how these in-school appliances impact student attendance.

Read more in

Analytics and School Attendance: A Laundry Story

VR heats up at YouTube

n June 22, the New York Times reported that, with the exception of the gaming industry, VR has proven a disappointment. It cites weak sales for VR headsets and the fact that all the “dabbling” in VR ventures has not amounted to serious strides.

But that may change with a boost from YouTube. The Google-owned video site is promoting the development of VR videos with new resources and tools that help developers and may make VR videos more attractive for marketing.

Which VR elements in a video get the most attention? That's something that creators are able to track with Heatmaps, a feature that YouTube rolled “for 360-degree and VR videos with over 1,000 views” on June 16.

You can see an example of a heatmap applied to a music video here: 

Read more in YouTube Heats Up VR Market

AI Transforms Business Data Models

(Image: pixone/iStockphoto)

As big data continues to grow, extracting value from it calls for new tools.

Increasingly, businesses that rely on data to drive decisions are applying AI to surface actionable insight quickly and accurately.

Finding innovative solutions to the problems raised in data analytics, particularly with respect to adapting machine learning to credit scores, is what they've been working on for the past six years at Experian's DataLabs. The EVP and Global Head of the labs, Eric Haller, spoke to All Analytics about the new direction for predictive modeling.

Read more in

AI, Machine Learning Power Transformation

Analytics for the Anderson Center for Autism

Concerns about retaining the staff prompted the Anderson Center for Autism to seek a tech

pic from http://www.happygreenbee.com/autism-spectrum-disorder-asd-facts-myths/

solution that was compatible with the center's people-first philosophy.

The Anderson Center for Autism is a nonprofit organization based in Staatsburg, N.Y. that operates a school and 100-acre residential campus comprising 20 buildings, as well as 25 adult houses across three counties. The center uses more than 400 desktops and data centers connected by fiber optics. The entire IT infrastructure has been in the cloud since 2012.

The picture for this organization was very different in 2001, when it was suffering from a lack of funding and inefficient processes, as well as high turnover. Then a new CEO took the helm and brought about a major transformation. Over the next decade, the center set up a cloud-based IT infrastructure and predictive analytics, which streamlined processes, cut down paperwork by 95 percent and reduced turnover significantly.

In 2003, Gregg Paulk was hired as the first IT manager for the center and was tasked with building out the infrastructure. He recalls, "We were in the dark ages."

- See more at: http://www.baselinemag.com/cloud-computing/cloud-mobile-and-analytics-help-retain-employees.html#sthash.LGb5pYyb.dpuf

Car analytics and AI

(Image: chombosan/Shutterstock)

Today's cars are all about mobility -- not just the kind that transports people and things, but also data mobility. Today's cars are more connected, and they are generating a lot more data that car manufacturers are working to collect, process, and apply to AI developments.

When the average person thinks about the connected car -- whether it is fully automated or packed with sensors that alert the driver to possible dangers -- what comes to mind is the experience for the person in that driver's seat. In fact, the information the driver sees represents only a tiny fraction of all the data collected through the sensor system. The amount of data collected is indeed vast, and car makers are now working on ways to ingest and process it effectively.

Read more in 

Car Makers Drive Hard Towards AI Advances

BI when and where it's needed

That was a critical factor in adopting WebFOCUS, Thiery says, because so many people rely on their phones more than on their desktop units. Consequently, reports that are not designed to be mobile-friendly are not as useful.

Generally, the visualizations are reviewed on a weekly basis at leadership meetings. Thiery explains that these meetings are where management "wants to see where we're at and where we're going." The meetings are also where managers make decisions about how many people they would hire.

As a result of the growth AudioNet has been experiencing, it's been adding on a large number of support people to keep up with the workload. "As our volume increases, so does our revenue," Thiery says.

The firm also uses WebFOCUS to analyze financial data. That includes revenue dollars, accounts and claims counts that factor into identifying an upward trend.

- See more at: http://www.baselinemag.com/business-intelligence/getting-business-intelligence-when-where-needed.html#sthash.BMoWyczs.dpuf

Data science training to fill the skills gap

 Datanami article looked at various estimates about how many more data scientists from firms like Gartner and McKinsey to arrive at a range of 100,000-190,000 shortfall by 2020 and 2017, respectively. That's about 60% more demand than available supply in the US. The upside is that salaries for those jobs go up, but the downside, of course, is that the businesses cannot progress on the data front as much as they would like to without the skilled people in-house.

The obvious solution to that problem is to get more people qualified for these jobs. If they didn't learn the skills in college programs, they can now get trained in specialty programs like the NYC Data Science Academy (NYCDSA). Vivian Zhang, the CTO of the school, set it up specifically to meet industry needs and get people the data science training needed to fill those open job slots.

Read more in 

Mind The Gap: Minting New Data Science and Analytics Professionals

Identifying the caterpillars the will become butterflies

Photo by Ariella Brown on https://www.pinterest.com/writewaypro/

As Wayne Gretzky famously observed, "You miss 100% of the shots you don't take." What holds for sports also applies to business opportunities. If you don't look into new market areas, you won't disocver new areas for expansion. But how to do so intelligently? That's where predictive analytics comes into play.

Whereas almost all large companies are already using predictive analytics in some form, not all have tapped into the power of anticipatory analytics, which can identify changes in companies before they happen. Recent developments in the anticipatory analytics space fuel a business solution Dun & Bradstreet refers to as "material change"—the ability to identify "the caterpillars that will turn into butterflies," Nipa Basu, chief analytics officer at Dun & Bradstreet explains.

Read more in http://www.baselinemag.com/analytics-big-data/benefits-of-predictive-and-anticipatory-analytics.html#sthash.emrIGaLj.dpuf

Location, location, location with a dash of analytics

"Location, location, location.” That’s the mantra of the real estate profession. It sounds simple enough, but the question is what is one looking for to identify a desirable location? Now data analytics can provide a clear answer for at least one type of market: those who seek homes within commuting distance of jobs that provide a living wage.

Opportunity Score is a data-driven tool built by the real estate company Redfin in partnership with the White House Opportunity Project. It identifies which residential areas offer affordable housing and are within a 30 minute carless commute of jobs that pay at least $40K a year.

In its blog, Redfin explained what went into powering Opportunity Score....

Considering a move, or just curious about how your own city ranks? You can plug it in to get the score. Just don’t expect to find a perfect 100. As Redfin explains, a city can start out with the 100 because of the number of jobs that meet the criteria, but then be knocked down due to the home prices. There’s also quite a difference between scores for cities in general and addresses in particular.

The highest score it assigned to a city is a 70, and that went to San Jose where 78% of jobs meet the criteria. But that’s not the only thing that counts. The same job percentage was found in Detroit, the city with the lowest score -- just 3%. Individual addresses around Detroit, though can reflect very high scores, with, for example, one address on Harrison Street earning the description “Job Seeker's Paradise” with a score of 94.

Read more in 

If You Lived Here, You’d Be Home Now

Amazing visualization for sports

You don’t have to be a sports fan to be impressed by what real time analytics can do for sports. With

new offerings from Intel, we can now know exactly what speed and what heights a snowboarder achieved, and we can get a 3D view of basketball that goes far beyond anything we’ve ever seen before.....

 for data capture in basketball, Intel applied something completely different, 360-Degree freeD Replays. In February Intel partnered with the National Basketball Association to deliver 3-D experience to the fans watching live on TNT or on NBA.com, or through the NBA App.

Intel’s CEO Brian Krzanich said the “sweeping views of top plays from virtually any angle” make it possible for “people to experience NBA All-Star like never before.” The way it works is by setting out 28 ultrahigh-definition cameras to capture video images that can then be combined for 3D views from any position.

An article inThe Cauldron, "Digitization Is Upon Us — The Biggest Change In Sports In Over 100 Years," explained that the court is rendered into “a series of "voxels," small cubes to make up the volume of the area. Then, a computer can virtually place a viewer anywhere, providing a complete 360-degree view. See the videos here 

Read more in 

Sports Data Like You’ve Never Seen Before

Algorithm predicts which couples will stay together

“He loves me. He loves me not.” Flower petals predictions have a 50 percent accuracy rate. Marriage

photo from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wedding_ring

therapists have a somewhat better rate of accuracy, but a computer algorithm beats most of them with nearly 79 percent accuracy. What puts the odds in its favor is measuring the tone of voice in couple interaction.
Read more in 

Algorithm Predicts Relationship Success

Related post:  predictive-analytics-for-relationships

Relatable robots

Advancements in robotics are not just about developing better robots to do work on their own. It’s about developing robots whose work is interacting with humans. Those robots have to be programmed with personality, which is not one-size-fits-all project.

The ideal robot companion for humans is not quite perfect. That’s the conclusion of PhD researcher Mriganka Biswas, supervised by Dr John Murray, from the University of Lincoln’s School of Computer Science who presented their findings the International Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems (IROS) conference in Hamburg this October, as reported in WT VOX.: "A companion robot needs to be friendly and have the ability to recognise users’ emotions and needs, and act accordingly. Despite this, robots used in previous research have lacked human characteristics so that users cannot relate -- how can we interact with something that is more perfect than we are?”

The good news is that it is possible to program robots to come across as more human. As the French company Aldebaran has discovered in developing culture-specific programming for humanoid robots in conjunction with its parent company, Softbank, what people would want for their humanoid robot varies, according to cultural expectations. That’s what it’s working on in developing the robot Pepper for international markets.

The controlling idea for developing a companion robot like Pepper is interaction. On one level, the robot acts like Siri on wheels. It has the ability to tap into the Internet to answer questions about the weather or local entertainment offerings. Beyond recognizing your voice and responding to what you ask, Pepper is equipped with built-in cameras and sensors that enable it to analyze facial expressions and body language to identify what a person is feeling.

Pepper communicates to humans through eye movements, what appears on the tablet it wears, and speech. What Pepper says can be neutral, playful, or didactic. Which of those three should be the default depends on the expectations of the humans around, and that’s where specialized programming comes in.

Read more in 

Our Robots, Our Selves

Smartphones are key for hotel rollout

In the future, hotel keys may be regarded as quaint, as guests will open doors with their own smartphones.

On August 11, Hilton Worldwide added a new feature to its Hilton HHonors app, the Digital Key. The hotel anticipates rolling it out to 250 Hilton properties in 2016, a brand that includes Waldorf Astoria, Contrad, and Canopy. The hotel chain had already offered digital check-in, but this allows guests to use their phones not only to reserve and register their rooms but to open them, eliminating the need to stop at the front desk altogether.

Credit: Flickr

Hilton is not the first chain to enable guests to use their smartphones as their room keys. The option has been offered at select locations of hotels chains, like Starwood. It’s a growing trend, according to Robert Cole, founder and CEO of RockCheetah, a hotel and destination marketing strategy and travel technology consulting practice. Cole anticipates a lot more hotels will adopt keyless entry options in the next few years. I spoke to him about the benefits that keyless systems offer the hotel industry.

Read more in 

Smartphones Open Doors, Literally

A game-changer for football

Many brands boast of being “The official… of the NFL.” This season, a technology company called Zebra claims a more unique position. It’s the Official On-Field Player-Tracking Provider of the National Football League.

With this partnership between the technology company and the NFL, the game played between the New England Patriots and the Pittsburgh Steelers last night represents more than just a season opener; it was a game-changer.

Credit: Pixabay

The September 10 game represented a first for fan access to Next Gen Stats” in real time. While the NFL has used Zebra information from thousands of plays over the past couple of years, the information was retained internally or shared for broadcast. This was the first game to make it directly accessible to fans through the NFL app for Microsoft's Xbox One. 

Read more in 

A Data-Driven Game-Changer for Football

Retailers get into predictive analytics

Here on All Analytics, we’re generally sold on the value of predictive analytics. The question is: Are retailers, particularly those managed by people who believe in their gut intuition, sold on it? Even they are starting to appreciate what analytics can do for their business.

Dean Abbott

According to Dean Abbott, co-founder and chief data scientist at SmarterHQ and author ofApplied Predictive Analytics: Principles and Techniques for the Professional Data Analyst, it is ushering a cultural change for retail.

I recently chatted with Abbott about what the application of predictive analytics means to the retail space. Read more in 

Predictive Analytics: Data and Retail Expertise