AI won’t end up being one thing, it will be present in many little applications – hopefully that will help us in our marketing. But what kind of AIs do we want? Are we looking at the ingredients that go into them?
Those are the kinds of questions innovations our guest considers as he makes AI models for healthcare and the retail marketing sectors.
Yash Gad is a data scientist, education advocate, and foodie. Founder and CEO of RingerSciences and Chief Data Scientist of Next Practices Group. He earned his PhD from University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign in Computational Biology, Neuroscience &, Biophysics and received his undergraduate degree from Johns Hopkins. He joins me from Austin TX.
Whenever your marketing is being assessed by an analyst, they will use one of two approaches.
The first is called Multi-touch attribution, which takes a customer who’s made a purchase decision, then puts weights on the touchpoints they had on various channels (Google calls their model ‘Data-driven attribution”) on the way to that point, to say which touchpoints were most influential.
The other approach they may use is Media Mix Modeling. From what previous podcast guest Kevin Hartman told me about MMM, it’s a ‘tremendous undertaking.’ It involves collecting and analyzing historical data in different geographies at different times of the year: sales figures, both legacy and digital marketing channels, and external factors like economic indicators and even weather. It has its own jargon: Incrementality, ratios, betas, impact on objectives. Then there’s the math. It uses regression methods, both linear and non-linear, Frequentist vs Bayesian statistics.
I get so overwhelmed with these modeling solutions, it’s like the old Who’s On First skit. I needed someone who would sort this out for me.
Our guest has been a consultant in the marketing and digital analytics space for 15 years. I’m currently focusing on helping clients quantify the impact of their marketing efforts using Marketing Mix Models, experimentation, and various attribution methodologies.
He is so passionate, he started a newsletter called MMM Hub
He graduated from Carnegie Mellon with a Masters degree in Information Technology, focused on Business Intelligence & Data Analytics.
Jim is great at showcasing other people in the analytics community -He truly believes that all of us are smarter than any one of us. He, along with Simon Poulton, co-host the MeasureUp podcast.
He talked with me from his home in Pittsburgh. Let’s meet Jim Gianoglio.
Market Mix Modeling (MMM) 101 – This is a good intro-level article highlighting the important high-level concepts of MMM
A Complete Guide to Marketing Mix Modeling – although this article/site is littered with a bunch of ads, the content is actually pretty good. It touches on the concepts as well as providing some code snippets for R, Python and SAS.
Videos / Courses to help get started with modeling:
MASS Analytics – Marketing Mix Modeling Master Classes – (free) 14 courses (YouTube videos) – very well done, starts at a beginner introduction to MMM and goes all the way through advanced modeling techniques. It’s about 3 hours in total.
Marketing Mix Modeling 101 – (free) online course (YouTube videos). This is 2.5 hours over 5 courses that focuses on MMM using Robyn, so is good if you’re comfortable using R.
You took the tags the free tools gave you and installed them on your site, you configured platforms and poured over their reports, you connected the systems and even hired developers to hook everything up to a database. And yet, you have little value to show for all the work you’ve put into your company’s analytics
You feel the analytics platforms are backing away from their responsibility to streamline all this. Instead, the answer from the largest of the bunch, Google, is they’ll hold onto your data if you use their newest tool, BigQuery, and pay them money to store your data …or is it their data… on it.
The bad news is summed up in a 2023 book whose euphemistic name is “You’re data is flawed”– don’t want to get an explicit rating for using the actual name
It was written by someone who empathizes with our situation and who lays out in the book the steps needed to generate positive financial returns for our analytics investment.
Our guest Mark McKenzie started his career in London, but moved in 2014 to sunny New Zealand to work for a data-focused digital agency. That led to him founding and growing an analytics firm that served clients locally and in the UK, Australia, and the US. Following the sale of that firm in 2022, he moved with his family back to the not-so-sunny UK. where he’s consulting with on digital analytics
His focus on analytics can be seen through his volunteering at events such as ‘MeasureCamp’ and ‘Web Analytics Wednesdays.’ Let’s talk with Mark McKenzie.
With Federated IDs, a company personalizes an experience for someone using digital data that was sourced (but not shared with the company) from multiple external systems.
The DIKW Pyramid of Data, Information, Knowledge, and Wisdom
146.879456 146.879456 Admitting our data is f*%#ed 622.046944 622.046944 prior to fixing data, must treat it as an asset 2369.560249 2369.560249 Fixing data we keep internally 3287.677599 3287.677599 Book and Mark’s contact info
Memes act as our collective memory’s transportation system. The instant they are seen or heard, our minds hop to whatever emotion the meme conveys. The use of this brain-hack is as scary as it is impressive.
Memes rarely come to us via broadcast media. Instead, they spread organically online. Most of the original uses for these have faded, while the internet has collectively assigned them new meanings.
Our guest was so interested in memes that he came out with a book in 2023 called Marketing Memetics to explain all that marketers must consider when using them.
Mike Taylor shares content on wider marketing topics, such as AI & prompt engineering, which O’Reilly has commissioned him to write a book that’s due to come out in 2024. Experimentation is also a passion; he’s run over 8,000 CRO experiments, and he shares the insights he gets on his social channels, and in courses he has on LinkedIn Learning and udemy.
His love of learning & teaching can be traced back to his studies at Anglia Ruskin University and U of Nottingham, where he obtained his masters degree.
But in between his schooling and the present, he was working in the marketing trenches, at places like Candor, SumoMe, ShopStyle, Travelzoo and marketing agency Ladder.io, which has grown from its beginnings with Mike and his co-founders to a team of 50 people.
When it comes to branding, there are many facets to getting it right. But we don’t have to know all about branding to know that only one mistake can cause deep, irreversible damage to a brand.
In 2009 the Tropicana juice company thought they’d be clever by taking their recognizable straw-in-an orange carton and simplify it down to an indistinct orangish object. Design critics howled and customers shied away from the sight of it at store shelves. In response to this 20% decline, Tropicana rapidly went back to the old packaging
Gerald Ratner, CEO of the UK Jewelry chain that bears his name, responded to a question about some of his products by saying they were ‘total crap.’ The company eventually closed over 300 of its stores, admitting that this comment caused a decisive blow to their reputation.
Subway named a game after long-time spokesman Jared Fogle’s famous weight loss pants and called it ‘JARED’S PANTS DANCE’, just at the time that Fogle pleaded guilty to sexual interference charges.
To learn how branding is done right, today we are speaking with Dan White.
He graduated from Cambridge University with a Masters of Arts. He has worked in marketing, market research and brand consultancy for 30 years. He is equally passionate about using imaginative visuals to bring marketing concepts to life. If people understand and remember an idea thanks to a clever framework or visual metaphor they will be able to use it in their day-to-day work.
Three people have been repeat guests on this show; Dan White is now the fourth.
