Posted by Ajay Kelkar on Sat, Apr 28, 2012
Innovators aren't exceptional as much as they are confident. So says David Kelley, the founder of the venerable Palo Alto, Calif., design firm IDEO.
Analytics has for long been considered a strategic tool but its use has been mastered only by few industries & a few companies within those industries. One hears about Capital One, Harrah’s casino & others who have dramatically impacted their business through use of analytics. But analytics is not new! Some of the statistical underpinnings of analytics are more than 40 years old (like the Logistic regression algorithm)
But innovation is much more about how you use analytics & so you need the “integrators”! These are people who understand the intersection of “data, technology, business & statistics”. And you have integrators who exist all across the company, not only in one department. And of course they need to have the courage to "fail" because without that "innovation" does not happen!
The increasing footprint of digital data is allowing such integrators to truly make an impact! The media business is one which is being impacted by changing reading habits & so the need to innovate is possibly far more urgent!
“The New York Times Company announced today the launch of Ricochet, a new approach to digital marketing. SAP, along with media agency Mindshare, is the first company to utilize this new marketing solution.
Developed in The New York Times Company’s Research & Development lab, and commercialized by the Times Company’s newly formed R&D Ventures group, Ricochet is a new model of digital marketing that blends media buying with a brand’s social media and owned media strategies. R&D Ventures evolved out of the R&D lab and brings promising new product concepts to market”
An example of one of the SAP-selected articles can be viewed here: http://r-i.co/ve. Here is that same article, as it appears to anyone who navigates to the page without using the Ricochet link:http://bits.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/04/19/supercomputing-rented-by-the-hour/.
So “Push” is being replaced by “Pull”. Earlier brands reached advertising through content now content is reaching the audience through the brand!
Think about it, would you expect the Times of India or Hindustan Times to deploy cutting edge analytics! Look at the forwarding looking investments that the New York Times seems to have made! http://bit.ly/pFvJB
And stuff like this is being supported by an Analytics tool:
“Ricochet operates in conjunction with Cascade, a proprietary data visualization tool that can monitor the sharing of content on Twitter. Cascade, which was also developed by the Times Company’s R&D lab, allows the brand to visualize the Ricochet links as they are shared on Twitter and thereby gain additional insights such as which key influencers are driving traffic to the content, what those influencers are saying, and which hashtags, if any, they use”
So there are ways to bring analytics into mainline business, it's just that it needs the "integrators" to step in!!