Funnel Reboot

Episode 192

In the world of capitalism, things that are rare are valuable.  Macallan single malt scotch, mint Joe Dimaggio rookie card, vintage Patek Philippe, a Stradivarius, Japanese Wagyu steak, a suit from a Savile Row tailor, an original Worhal painting, or a made-to-order Rolls Royce Phantom. It also extends to digital assets, like the domain Tesla.com, which the original registrant sold to the car company in 2014 for $11 million.

We can add another item that’s limited, arguably it’s a one of a kind. But just like all other goods with high sticker prices, opportunists have attempted mass-producing it, commoditizing it. They’re idea has been to make it common enough and thus cheap enough to be sold everyday in a large marketplace. 

The valuable resource that each of us has, of course, is time. About 200 years ago it became a measured thing, called attention. Ever since, the price it’s assigned has been paced by the places where media can be shown. In the present day, with a prolific amount of media-friendly technology around us, there’s almost no place where they don’t vy for our attention. 

This is bad for consumers. But today’s guest points out how it’s not just bad for them. It’s bad for advertisers, too. He says that bad actors, those who are unscrupulous about what ads they show and how frequently they show them, are spoiling this for the rest of us. The excessive amount of messages aimed at consumers is undermining their ability to absorb them, decreasing the effectiveness of the advertising we do. 

Taken to the extreme, the cheapening of consumer attention could harm the internet as a whole.  A book by Tim Hwang, ‘the subprime attention crisis”  points out that many information sites we all rely on are ad-supported, and the less ad revenue coming in, the less viable these publishers become. 

Our guest is someone who has worked with notable leaders in the marketing technology space and who now runs his own media company.  

He is the CEO of The Martech Weekly (TMW), a media company that’s read by leading marketing and technology executives in more than 65 countries. 

He also hosts the Martech World Forum, an international gathering of world leaders in marketing technology and is a contributor to the “Making Sense of MarTech” podcast.  

We’re heading to Melbourne Australia to speak with Juan Mendoza

 

Timestamps/Chapters

(00:00:00) – Intro

00:04:24 – Welcome Juan

00:10:28 – Attention is Finite

00:14:56 – Impact of hitting people’s attention ‘cap’

00:27:26 – Public Service Announcement

00:27:56 – The ‘attention inflation’ problem

00:38:11 – Historical precedents for what we are experiencing

00:41:56 – Where to contact Juan

Listen to episode

People, Products and Concepts mentioned in the show

Juan’s piece on Inflating Attention

TMW, The Martech Weekly

Martech World Forum

Juan on LinkedIn

Subprime Attention Crisis: Advertising and the Time Bomb at the Heart of the Internet by Tim Hwang | Goodreads

Keanu Taylor

Scott Galloway

MrBeast – YouTube

Episode 190

We’ve all heard of 1970’s Apollo 13 mission that was supposed to send a 3-man crew to the moon, but once NASA became aware of an on-board explosion, it became all about rescuing the crew. 

Ron Howard’s 1995 movie gives a glimpse of how mission control staff in Houston reacted to information about the explosion. 

When an alarm on the command module flashed, signaling a power drop, Flight Director Gene Kranz (portrayed by Ed Harris) turned to the mission controller in charge of emergencies and said “is this an instrumentation problem, or are we looking at real power loss here?” That officer, named Sy Liebergot and played by the director’s brother Clive Howard said “It’s, it’s reading a quadruple failure – that can’t happen! It’s, it’s got to be instrumentation.”

But by following their procedures, NASA confirmed it wasn’t an instrumentation problem, the ship had actually suffered a devastating explosion, and at that point they swung into rescue mode. 

NASA aren’t the only ones who, on seeing data put in front of them, are so quick to dismiss it.

Dashboards – and the work it takes to implement them – isn’t trivial. Yet many of them fail…meaning that once they’re built they never get looked at. 

There are those who blame technical problems for this, but just like in Apollo 13, the main failures are due to people problems. The technology can be used to visualize  exactly the operational data that people literally  asked for…and present them with self-serve solutions, but they ignore the data, waving it away as some sort of instrumentation problem

Our guest is going to tell us the right way to pull off dashboard projects.  

He’ll show how to engage the stakeholders to express what metrics they really need, ones that show how the organization is tracking towards reaching its vision.

Nicholas Kelly, currently the principal consultant and trainer at G&K Consulting, holds a Bachelor of Computer Science from University College Cork. Formerly a Deloitte Analytics Senior Manager, he specializes in designing and developing dashboards for major global companies, including banks and Formula 1 teams. Nick is a frequent speaker at international conferences, having trained thousands of professionals in data visualization and analytics adoption. As a management consultant, educator, and author, his focus is on teamwork, inventive methods, and bridging technical gaps to increase data literacy. He is also the creator of business board games and the author of the book “Delivering Data Analytics.”

Let’s go to Seattle where I caught up with Nick Kelly. 

 

Chapter Timestamps

00:00:00 – Intro

00:03:57 – Welcome Nick

00:08:18 – Why dashboard projects fail

00:34:46 – PSA

00:35:35 – Building the dashboard

00:57:12 – Where to get book; contact Nick

 

Listen to episode

People, products and concepts mentioned in show:

The book and site for Delivering Data Analytics

Nick on LinkedIn

Nick is the inventor of the Dashboard Wireframe Kit and the DataStory Cards

Waterfall vs Agile project methodologies

BFCM – Black-Friday Cyber-Monday