Can We Better Balance Wisdom and Intelligence?

How much of the data on your (I’m sure) very comprehensive and cool-looking dashboard do you actually review and (key) act on??

Who doesn’t love a good dashboard? I’ve seen business won and lost based on dashboard design…never mind the data that it might contain.?

Think about it, we have always had data. We have always used data. Once called observations and meticulously recorded, our world views have changed time and time again from the time we “discovered” that the Earth and planets circled the sun…for example…or the mathematics of a triangle that enabled incredible buildings and timeless structures.?

Over time we observed, recorded, and added wisdom to more. A cruise to the Galapagos gave us Evolution. An apple bonk on the head gave us gravity (good story, though). An overflowing bath gave us volume (another good one). The list goes on and on.?

Over time, our methods of recording, storing, and comparing got better and better. As the computer age dawned, we hit the motherlode, because now we could actually record, store, and cross-tab purchase information…product; price; who bought; geographic area, and more. And the age of remote selling was born (first printed catalogs, then radio, TV DTC, and now digital).?

In the beginning, it was simple punch cards and the key metrics were R/F/M… Recency: when did you last buy it?

Frequency: how often did you buy??

Monetary: how much did you spend??

The three most powerful and accurate predictors of your next purchase.?

BUT WAIT, there was also INSIGHT…call it WISDOM…the observations made about what you bought, what you didn’t buy, the weather, the comments you made (yes, even before “comments” people actually commented—shocking, no?) to name a few.

Then the dam burst and we had enough data to fill a universe of servers…to raise global temperatures a degree or two.?

We had the ability to build out incredibly designed dashboards with amazing information and ostensibly all that we needed to get everyone to buy or do or whatever it was that we wanted all the time.?

And, yet, advertisers and merchants still talk about the 50%...the same 50% their ancestors talked about that don’t follow the carefully laid out and data-driven script. So, what do we do?

I have heard from some of the best Performance Marketers, the non-DIGIBABBLE crowd, for a while now…that Google Analytics isn’t the Holy Grail, and that much, most, or all of the data that some “unscrupulous” providers claim is gathered in their proprietary systems is actually Google packaged differently…on Dashboards…a story for another time…but do hold the thought.?

Be that as it may, all of this leads to my IMAGINE of today and its inspiration…the recent, latest scandal enmeshing Google—and that’s over Youtube reporting.?

From an Engadget Report by Kris Holt:

?“Through the Google Video Partner (GVP) network and?TrueView?(an ad product that's also used on?YouTube), the company handles placement of video ads on external websites and apps. According to?The Wall Street Journal, Google tells brands that their ads will be on ‘high-quality’ sites, appear before the main content of a video and run with audio on. It also says that advertisers won't pay if users skip the ads. However, a third-party analytics company suggested in a report that Google fails to live up to these standards around 80 percent of the time.

Adalytics said the ads often appear on lower-quality websites, such as those with misinformation or pirated content, and that they can be positioned in small video players on the side or bottom of the screen, away from the main "in-stream" content. Some of the ads run without any audio,?according to the report,?while in other cases, there was ‘little to no video content in between consecutive TrueView ads.’ Adalytics says other ads autoplayed without the viewer engaging with them.”

Holt continues:

“In some instances, the company notes, the skip button that typically appears after five seconds was obscured, forcing viewers to watch the whole ad. That's ‘a direct violation of Google’s quality standards for TrueView ads,’ Adalytics says, and it may have contributed to artificially inflated ad metrics, leading to advertisers paying more.

Adalytics reviewed ad campaigns for more than 1,100 brands between 2020 and this year. It says customers that might have bought ‘muted, auto-playing, mis-declared TrueView skippable in-stream inventory include’ the US government, the European Parliament, Disney+, HP, Samsung, Sephora, TikTok, Microsoft and General Motors. As it happens, some other Google divisions (Google Career Certificates and Google Workspace Domains) are on the list.”

Google, of course, denies it all.?

Advertisers, though, are taking note:

“Media buyers Adalytics shared the report with accused Google of conducting ‘ad fraud’ and suggested brands weren't getting what they paid for. Others have demanded a refund. The ‘misalignment’ could have cost brands billions in advertising dollars, Adalytics said. One ‘major consumer goods brand’ found that 20 percent of a $75,000-plus campaign budget was directed toward YouTube channels, with the remainder spent on ads that ran on third-party destinations such as investing.com and?Candy Crush Saga.”

This leads me to believe they knew all along but so many are beholden to Google and a DIGIBBABLE narrative that they looked the other way.?

To me…where there is smoke, there is fire. What about their other analytics–the selling of them or our dependence on them? OH BOY! Finally, I point out that the solution Google suggests is your old-fashioned eyeball audit.?

AI, dear readers, is not the solution here. If the data is wrong or irrelevant, we will only have more reams of wrong or irrelevant data.

Not to mention safety and security…do they, meaning we, really need all that data?

The late great Lester Wunderman, who foresaw the data-rich world we live in long before it was a blip anywhere else, and who pioneered the use of data to sell direct, once said, “Consumers would sleep a whole lot better if they realized that most of the data being collected today is actually useless and not actionable.”

I come back to my IMAGINE questions:

1. Be honest about your dashboards…as beautiful as they may be.
2. Ask yourself: how much Wisdom are you applying to your decisions??

Some thoughts as the collection and use of some data is being and will be further restricted by legislation around the world:

1. Determine what data you actually use that moves the needle and at what cost. I have seen minor increments that look amazing in the way they are reported but that have negative cost benefits.
2. Wisdom…know your customer. Talk to them. Engage with them as human beings. Learn. All the AI in the world will never replace this.
3. Your products and services need to be great. There is no data replacement for a crappy experience.?
4. Learn…don’t leave it all to the machine…sit with your team and agonize as you analyze. There is nothing as powerful as your own analysis of the data linked to your anecdotal engagement with your customers.?

And be skeptical. DIGIBABBLE still has a hold on some…the Tower Of Mordor hasn’t fallen yet, but it is clear that the Armies of Wisdom are on the rise.?

One last point…we live in a digital world. Get over it. Obviously, all is digital. And data is powerful and useful.

Wisdom? What's your view??