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If you take the big theme in corporate boardrooms- ROI, add onto it the possibility of brilliant data viz and then think about the iPad as the device of choice for high flying CMOs, with this you have to think that the Excel spreadsheet is going the way of the dodo as a measurement tool and interface,

Instead you are going to have a real-time live feed that looks glorious and tells you everything you need to to know at a touch of a button. There will be no need to wait for this week's numbers, the hourly numbers will be right in front of you and not only that, they will be correlated and comparable with your media investments, your daily brand performance and your social media stats.

Data is the new gold and those who find ways to make it more user-friendly and relevant are going to be onto something big.

Everyone knows the social media measurement industry has expanded to the point where there are now a variety of options and choice, further evidence of the maturity of this business is that we are now seeing services develop for specific verticals.

One nice example, comes from Next Big Sound, you can see their key dashboard visuals at the top of this post.

They describe what they do as follows:

We believe in the power of data to transform the music industry.

The listening, discovery, and purchase decisions of millions of consumers has moved online and the pace of this transition is only accelerating.

Next Big Sound provides a centralized place to monitor all the behavior and activity happening for artists both online and off.

This is just an example that shows one piece of the puzzle heading down a very vertical avenue. We are likely to see more of this because industries will want to benchmark their performance against category rivals.

We are still a long ways from the single real-time dashboard, but when this arrives, it's going to be very interesting to see what happens. Marketing teams are going to have the data to make informed decisions like never before and this new future offers both promise and peril for those in the communication business, depending on how clients to choose to use it. 

There's going to be a real broad need for disciplined data teaching, learning and transfer of best practices with clients and inside communication agencies.

Data Analytics will have to move from the back office to the front of the house.

Posted by Ed Cotton It used to be that only very few areas of business got to sprinkle the creative magic dust- these were the marketing folks and they did cool sales events and if they were really lucky they got to do the big prize, television commercials.

For many, this was the chance to bask in the headlights of fame as advertising brought your brand and your job to a national audience. If you got it right, you would be noticed and talked about, not just your brand, but you the marketer.

In this world ,there was an uneven distribution of creative talent, the advertising got all the attention and some areas got nothing at all. In such a world, those other areas of the business that lacked the creative magic dust, could and would look dull and uninteresting to those with it. At an extreme, the scientists in the R&D labs rarely got to hire a top flight agency creative team to present their meeting findings, similarly the Accounting Department couldn't do the same at their financial meetings with the board. Meanwhile, the marketing and advertising department could look way better than anyone else and bask in the glory that was their advertising, providing it was good!

Since there's been a democratization of creative technology and costs have come down rapidly, other departments have been elevating their game and making their stuff sexier. Data is the talk of the town right now, it's the thing that agencies are looking to provide and clients want to showcase their ROI, but it's not sexy and it's very hard to bring creativity into it, unless you have a data visualization wizard on your team.

That said, I found this video from Gatorade really interesting, it's all about one facet of their marketing department- the social media measurement team, this could be presented in a really dry and boring way and have nothing to do with the energy of the brand. However, in this little film where they explain in a topline way what they do, they brand themselves "Mission Control" is way more interesting than "Social Media Monitoring" and importantly, they show not just how they're essential for the business, but how they connect to the brand.



Data is obviously the area where creativity can have a huge impact, but there are so many other areas of business that are going to benefit from and will need to have creative firepower, to bring their skills and stories to life. This is not just a story about democratization of creativity, but in an era of fading and faded attention spans, everyone, irrespective of department, needs a creative way to bring their stories to life.


Posted by Ed Cotton

There was a time when data was a passive thing; it took time to look through and by the time you had done the analysis, the world had moved on and it was kind of outdated. With advances in computing power, we are now about to enter a new phase in which data, instead of being a component of dusty old reports, is the new gold of business advantage. The faster and more powerful your computer and servers, the faster it can crunch and analyze the data and therefore the quicker you have real information you can act on.

If you take data from multiple sources, look for correlations and key patterns that takes computing power, but if your computers are fast enough, and they are now, you have something.

Here's John Webster on Cnet talking about IBM's recent acquisition of Netezza.

"But, beyond the short-term tactical aspect of the Netezza acquisition is a longer-term positioning of IBM that is far more significant. Traditional data warehousing--as a relatively slow process that depends on reiterative data extract, transform, and load (ETL) processes--is essentially dead. What customers are now looking for is speed to information. These appliances offer the ability to parse large data sets from multiple sources in a nontraditional ETL way and to produce information in real or near real time.
Posted by Ed Cotton Most of us have seen how something like Mint can be useful tool to better understand our spending habits when we compare it with others or Nike+ also us to compare our training performance with others.

We are obviously going to see more of the benefits of collective data over time and especially with the data coming from mobile devices.

Mobile Logger is an iPhone application developed by Robert Carlsen that's designed for bicyclist to log their journeys and share the data from those journeys with us. Obviously, the more data that gets input into the system, the better it is for everyone.



While we might all use social media and geo-social applications, the level of data provide is pretty minimal, it's all surface and basic. Clearly, the players have a lot more data than they would care to share with their users and perhaps this something they should look into more. Sharing more data could be useful to users from a comparison perspective and pure insight, it would also enable the players to be seen as more transparent, which is clearly a big issue right now.

Mobile Logger might be one of the first of it's kind beyond Nike+, it goes beyond the basic functionality and uses the phone's microphone to pick up and monitor noise levels which gives a nice indication of traffic flow.

It appears the shine might be off branded applications, but if they were more useful and engaged users around shared data, perhaps they could play a role.


Posted by Ed Cotton An amazing example of a brand using data to create an experience. In this case it's Lufthansa in its brand academy in Frankfurt.



Posted by Ed Cotton I have written in the past about the new world of data visualization and the fact it has almost become a new art form. I am going to change my tune here a little and suggest that is going to become an essential tool for anyone working in the agency, strategy, media space.

Our clients are demanding more and more interesting looks at data from us, so we better have a nice way to communicate all this stuff. Aside from the creative department, not many of us have the visual skills to make this work, so we are going to rely on existing tools to make this happen.

One example is Modest Maps which requires a little bit of technical expertise, but can be used to great effect. Take a look at this which shows the spread of Wal-Mart over time.

Going back to the seductiveness of data visualization, at it's best it can become great content as this BBC series, Britain from Above shows. If you get it right it can fascinate, delight us and help us to better understand our world or our business.






Posted by Ed Cotton