The marketing discipline continues to evolve and has become a complex, rapidly changing, and noisy daily battle. Cutting through this noise and measuring the signals that matter is an increasingly difficult challenge.
I think measurement is about designing for success and then finding new ways to win.
The first question to ask is what counts?
Talking to Marketing Week, Catherine Newman, chief marketing officer for The Times and Sunday Times said
Mass reach is an obsession with people when it comes to digital and the internet,” , contending that it is better to reach 10,000 who have interacted with a brand and are like-minded rather than 1m people but not know who they are.
“It’s not useful to flood the market when it may be cheap but not effective,” she reasoned. “People have to question what metric they’re chasing…”
I came across this fabulous POV over Origami Logic.
Marketing signals — unlike traditional metrics or data — include multi-dimensional measures of quality and relevance to ensure they generate the best and most valuable insights. Additionally, calculations of KPIs specific to campaign objectives and categorization of performance by brand, country, product, etc., add context to the data and make results more relevant to the business. Finally, marketing signals blend science (numbers and metrics) with art (creative, copy, metadata, and strategy) to comprehensively illustrate what is working.
Simply put, marketing signals go beyond representing results. They reach further, bridging the gap between raw data and insights, allowing marketers to gain immediate and clear direction on where opportunities lie and how to further improve results.
I’m liking the the notion of signal over score, of engagement over impression and fundamentally of objective over everything.
I love to do what counts first and then count what we do.
- Strategy: The Essential Reading Guide 2019
- Byron Sharp- How Brands Grow
- Mark Ritson
- Mark Pollard
- Julian Cole
- https://www.skillshare.com/classes/Communications-Planning-Crash-Course/527585589
- Subscribe to his fortnightly Planning Dirty newsletter where he shares tools, resources and brain bombs for your comms http://bit.ly/PlanningDirty
- APG Strategy Conference 2018 | On The Contrary
- https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLTy6ltcTOMUIlyPBby_SqU701NpHF_gHq
Events
- Creative Mornings- is definitely worth getting to….
- https://www.facebook.com/CreativeMorningsSydney/
- subscribe to their email here https://creativemornings.com/cities/syd
- https://www.sydneytalks.com.au/
- Ignite http://www.ignitesydney.com/
- https://sydney.edu.au/news-opinion/sydney-ideas.html
- https://www.pechakucha.org/cities/sydney
- loads of things at Giant Dwarf- The Moth, StoryClub, Erotic Fan Fiction…
- Have a look at the Skills Maturity Matrix and evaluate where you are: https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/18vPo7S1KJqxBWaZYcLVa3f4Zwuc94zcp8_aKBviS3Y8/edit#gid=0 (this is by the awesome Clay Parker Jones and unpacked here https://www.cpj.fyi/the-undercurrent-skills-maturity-matrix/ )
- carve out 30 mins a day to explore information/ inspiration
- take at least 30 mins one a day a week to record and reflect the week’s journey- what have you learned?
- the hard part here is just to start
- my process was to just take the three most resonant things and do a bit of a compare and contrast….
- here’s my blog- and an example of a month worth of reflections- https://katiechatfield.wordpress.com/2006/10/ (just an example- you could explore https://katiechatfield.wordpress.com/category/great-stuff/ or https://katiechatfield.wordpress.com/category/experience/)
- Schedule a 30 min chat with someone who will challenge you once a month to explore what you’ve found and how it’s informed your thinking
Had an interesting question about the triangulation exercise– how long should it be?
In a true form I’d have to say: How long is the truth?
I’ve put the challenge forward with ‘manifest the outcome how you like…’
I do know that the blank page is the hardest to start with and the that structure is a fine tool to get the ball rolling….
So to help actually answer the question I can put forward some options on process and practice:
- I’m a big fan of visual thinking as a tool to explore intersection- to mine where commonality lies and to use it to find a singular point of truth
- the above was a bit of a joke for a mate (if you’re not a Top Gun fan- it means that the absolute truth between his three favourite things is that they FVROOM/ Doppler effect/or can disappear out of sight in a second)
- this was a while ago- today I’d say that the intersection could be brought to life by Archer
- this might mean that you could structure a deck like this:
- Demonstrate key learnings/ Identify themes: one chart each on the major themes of each of the articles
- Explore intersections: commonalities between each article
- The absolute truth- your key out take/ observation/ pov
- the above was a bit of a joke for a mate (if you’re not a Top Gun fan- it means that the absolute truth between his three favourite things is that they FVROOM/ Doppler effect/or can disappear out of sight in a second)
- When I started doing these exercises myself as blog posts I tried to keep them around 300 words
I’d love to see a podcast, an interpretive dance, a cartoon if that can take us on a journey of your thinking.
I’m as interested in what you see along the way as the destination of your journey.
Anyhoo- good luck, and thanks for asking.
Filed under: triangulation
In social science triangulation is defined as the mixing of data or methods so that diverse viewpoints or standpoints cast light about a topic.
You can use it to unpick bias in news reporting, and in design you’d use it to find ‘apparent truth’.
I like that term. Apparent truth. It feels like chocolate.
If you want a bit of substantiation here’s a paper full of fruit cake dense notions like ‘epistemological chasms’, ‘empiricist view points’ and ‘hypothetico- deductive methods’.
I’ve written about personal taxonomies, my Bowerbird ways, and general bricolage and pirate treasure pursuits for collecting stimulus. What I’m looking forward to exploring (with my team and you if you like) is how stimulus can used to grow perspective: both and the practice of developing perspective and the articulation of your thoughts.
Wassa?
So what’s going to happen here is a weekly challenge to triangulate three ‘cultural objects’.
How?
Randomly selected by me with the only selection criteria that I found it recently and I think there’s something interesting in the intersection.
Why?
- A group practice in order to generate a dialectic of learning
- Examine the contrasts between what seems self-evident, what seems to underlie the lay discourses, what appears to be generally true and what differences arise when comparing all these with ‘official’ interpretations.
- Build interpretation skills
- Move away from the fetishism of quantative research methods (ooo!)
- Deepen and widen your understanding of culture
So here’s the challenge
Read and form a perspective on what these three things say about ‘culture’:
- Society Tells Men That Friendship Is Girly. Men Respond by Not Having Friends.
- Tavi’s Super Heroine: An Interview With Lorde (and hello to you! Mr Gillespie)
Join in! Manifest it how you like- I’ll get back to you on the conversation this prompts at the end of the week and whatever objects are created…
Get Shouty 
