Digital Analytics and Greek Mythology

Greece may be a country you have visited; perhaps you are there right now or planning to. I remember fondly visiting Athens for Easter in 2008. I have always been fascinated by Greek mythology and psychology. You might have heard about the Oedipus Complex, but it's only one of many with a foundation in Greek mythology. One way to interpret mythology is how it analyses and communicates a complex behaviour as a story to maximise awareness and reach. Psychology can often have similar goals, so why reinvent the wheel? Let's recycle the stories of Greek mythology!

As I am ever so keen to uncover the roots of Digital Analytics, the Enlightenment has always appealed to me, but we can go deeper, all the way to Greek mythology. However, as a back-and-forth ChatGPT session yesterday, I asked about mythological references that resonate with Digital Analytics today. The results I got were interesting, and I wanted to share them with you.

Theseus

Thesus was the son of Aegeus, the King of Athens. Minos, the King of Crete, had a son, Androgeus and a daughter, Ariadne. Androgenus died after visiting Aegeus, and his father sent his armies to conquer Athens to avenge this death. Every nine years, Athens had to pay tribute to King Minos, seven boys and seven girls, which he would serve to feed a half-man, half-bull creature called the Minotaur.

Theseus decided to stop that tribute and kill the Minotaur. He volunteered to be one of the seven boys to be sacrificed. But there was a slight problem: King Minos asked his architect, Daedalus, to build a labyrinth around the Minotaur, and escaping the maze was impossible. Upon arriving, none suspected Theseus' cunning plan. Ariadne inspected the seven boys and seven girls. She fell in love with Theseus at first sight and asked Daedalus to help him come out alive.

Ariadne made Theseus an offer he could not refuse: a ball of thread, which, by tying one at the maze's entrance, would help him find his way out, but he would have to marry her when he returned. Theseus accepts, and as soon as nobody can see him anymore, he draws the sword hidden under his clothes. Soon, he finds and slays the Minotaur. All he has to do is follow Ariadne's thread to find his way out.

This myth resonates with Digital Analytics because it reminds me of how analysis paralysis strikes when you have so much data to analyse. Where do you start? Unless you have a strategy, it is easy to feel lost, as if inside Daedalus' maze. Some rely on AARRR (acquisition, activation, retention, referral, and revenue) or REAN (reach, engage, activate, nurture). Relying on one such method to analyse the data is akin to having Ariadne's ball of thread.

Odysseus

Eris, the goddess of discord, was not particularly popular. During an important wedding, she threw a golden apple to the attendees bearing the message: "To the fairest of all". Three other goddesses coveted the apple: Hera (wife of Zeus, the god of all gods), Athena (daughter of Zeus and goddess of justice), and Aphrodite (goddess of love and beauty). Zeus chose Paris to decide who should have the golden apple.

Although just a shepherd, Paris is a prince of Troy, the wealthiest town in the far east Mediterranean. His father learned from a soothsayer that Paris would cause the fall of Troy and decided to keep him away from affairs to prevent the prophecy from becoming true. Suddenly, three goddesses appear before him. Hera offers him to rule over Europe and Asia; he refuses. Athena offers him to triumph over all the Greeks, Troy's enemies; he refuses. Aphrodite offers him the most beautiful woman in the world; he accepts.

Paris visits Sparta and King Menelaus. Helen is the most beautiful woman Paris has ever met, but she is the king's wife! Having chosen Aphrodite's offer, Paris steals Helen and returns with her to Troy. King Menelaus, not finding Helen, builds a coalition of other Greek kings and declares war on Troy. The soothsayer was right, and there was nothing that Paris' father could have done to avoid the war.

A thousand Greek ships sail to Troy. On one of them, Odysseus, King of Ithaca, is sailing. After the war, Odysseus is still alive and keen to return home to his wife Penelope and son Telemachus. Returning home will take him ten years, and he will endure many challenges. Back home, in Ithaca, Odysseus is presumed dead. Many pressure Penelope to marry again and disregard Telemachus for a child, although he is almost an adult now.

The goddess Athena takes pity on Odysseus for not finding his way home. She visits Telemacha, disguised as one of his father's old friends. Telemachus still believed that his father lived and visited other Greek kings, some of whom had seen his father recently. Eventually, Telemachus finds his father, and they return home together.

In Odysseus' home, many suitors drink Odysseus' wine and refuse to leave until Penelope marries again. At day, Penelope is weaving a shroud for Laertes, Odysseus' father, for when he dies. She promises to choose a suitor when the shroud is completed. But at night, she undoes all the weaving she did during the day. The ruse continues until a servant betrays her. As Penelope finds herself in a terrible situation, Telemachus, her son, returns home—Odysseus, her husband in tow, but in disguise.

There was a time we could call the golden age of Digital Analytics. WebTrends was founded in 1993 and switched to Javascript to collect data not until 2002, about a decade after browsers started supporting Javascript. Mobile phones had web browsers for a while but only supported Javascript in the early 2000s. In 2005, Google acquired Urchin and rebranded its product, Google Analytics. By 2008, many companies cut down the budgets of many of their teams in response to the subprime crisis. They spared their Digital Analytics teams from such budget cuts, and some even created their Digital Analytics teams from scratch at that time.

By 2010, many Big Data companies started seeing Digital Analytics as merely a stepping stone for something bigger. Many companies saw Big Data vendors after another claim that Digital Analytics was dead and that they should reinvest their budgets into Big Data solutions. This resonates with the pressure that Penelope is facing with the many suitors claiming that her husband is dead and she should remarry.

Meanwhile, companies are showing resistance to letting data drive their business decisions. Officially, they profess to be a data-driven organisation but have little to show for it apart from appointing a Chief Data Officer and making flashy investments in data tools. Penelope also pretended to support the idea of marrying again, claiming she needs time when postponing the decision for as long as she can.

We can see similarities between Odysseus' lost decade and the so-called AI Winters, prolonged periods of underinvestment in AI in the 1970s and 1980s. With Big Data companies undermining Digital Analytics' limited remit, we have endured over a decade of underinvestment in our field. In AI, new generations could keep the flame alive, rebranding it as something else so as not to trigger anti-AI proponents. Odysseus returned, but in disguise, with the help of his son. AI is thriving today thanks to a younger generation.

What Digital Analytics Winter needs to cease is a new generation that will continue advancing in our field, quietly amassing evidence of delivering business value, but under a different name than Digital Analytics. After all, the term Analytics has become very confusing for many outside our field. People consider what we do as part of Analytics in some countries but not the UK. Try applying for a Head of Analytics role in the UK with a background in Digital Analytics if you don't believe me.

Other myths

There are many other mythological references that I could have covered. In Greek mythology, the Oracle of Delphi could analyse signs to help make informed decisions. Today, we could talk about so-called weak signals. We also have Cassandra, who could predict the future, but nobody ever believed. That will resonate with many digital analysts trying to improve processes but failing to get buy-in.

In Norse (Viking) mythology, we have Yggdrasil, a sacred world tree with nine roots into different worlds, connecting them all. What a wonderful metaphor for how cross-disciplinary and cross-channel Digital Analytics is!

In Egyptian mythology, there's the Ma'at (truth and justice) concept, which can be a metaphor for a quest for truth with data quality, integrity and governance to make better decisions. However intriguing it would be, the English words Math and Ma'at seem to have no connection; it's a coincidence.

In Chinese mythology, it could be a historical figure; we have the story of Yu the Great. He studied floods to harness them into a force for good that would irrigate the land, produce bountiful harvests, and benefit society as a whole.

I must admit that I only discovered these last two myths thanks to ChatGPT, and I am sure there are many more. As Big Data is facing its first winter with budgets reassigned to AI, we may have an opportunity to prove that Digital Analytics can deliver business value. Whatever regulations rocked our field since GDPR, browser vendors' changes to how cookies and localStorage work, and perceived limits, Digital Analytics is still there, but perhaps there's something in Odysseus' story for continuing it under another name, with the help of a new generation.

#MeasureCamp #DigitalAnalytics #Mythology #Theseus #Odysseus #WAWCPH #CBUSDAW

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