Modelling and Mathematics

The holiday season is a weird time of the year - you end up watching all sorts of crappy television shows that you wouldn't necessarily end up watching. So, as i was surfing through the channels there was a re-run of 'Extreme Makeover' on. The program takes people with low self esteem (or ugly depending on how you look at it) and transforms them into 'beautiful' people. Bottom line is that they all end up looking the same. White teeth, button nose, big hair, raised cheekbones and the customary inflated chest. Now I don't know about you but does everyone want to look like this? Is the 'porn-star' look really so beautiful? Damn, i may have just lost half of my readers!

That got me thinking about why do the surgeons end up with this template? Is there a formula for what constitutes beauty? A straw poll of women i know (yeah yeah, a short list...so not representative!) suggest its all about facial symmetry. But is that really the case?

So guess what, 0.32 seconds after googling tells me it's already been solved:

The ancient Greeks identified that the key to beauty for all ages, races and sexes is about proportions of symmetry. This was coined 'The divine proportion' or the 'golden ratio' of 1.618 (So they were wrong in the Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy)

According to the formula, if the width of the face from cheek to cheek is 10 inches (25 centimetres), then the length of the face from the top of the head to the bottom of the chin should be 16.18 inches to be in ideal proportion. If you're keen to see how you measure up, keep in mind that the ratio also applies to:

+ The width of the mouth to the width of the cheek.

+ The width of the nose to the width of the mouth.

Of course I did the measurements on myself...i should be cracking mirrors so i dumped the Greeks

Esquire magazine picked Scarlett Johansson as their “Sexiest Woman Alive,” and if you are wondering what criteria they may have used, i don't know, but she doesn't fit the divine proportions

So I immediately went to models (a natural leap) as generally when you look at models they all actually look different, some have high foreheads (Lily Cole), freckles (Karen Elson) even short legs (Kate Moss) and what about the small eyes and no eyebrows on stunning Alek Wek- its all about quirkiness and being beautiful because of your flaws rather than in spite of them. However they all have (again sample of one) higher cheek bones, a thinner jaw, and larger eyes relative to the size of their faces. That gave me some variables

So here's my effort:

% Beauty = 0.40 x eyes (bigger and brighter the better) + 0.25 x cheekbones (higher natch) + 0.15 x lips (post-rationalised for Angelina Jolie) + 0.1 x chin (we had a conversation about Tracey Thorn last night) + 0.05 x skin (clearer the better) + 0.05 x facial symmetry (just to piss the Greeks off)

In order to get to this i went through the trashy mags in my house (US weekly, Star, Heat etc) and tested my formula, tweaking the coefficients as I went. As you can see by my estimates , its not an exact science either.

DISCLAIMER: Clients reading this....we don't do it this way for you...its much more complex, sophisticated and expensive than that!

So yes readers, we shouldn't all be running to the plastic surgeon.....we all should be sceptical of any formula that says that the same people will seem beautiful to everyone, because that's simply not true.

I got this last line from my mother (RIP) - a truly beautiful and remarkable woman

"Beauty is in the eye of the beholder but ugly is seen clear to the bone."

Amen

You are unique!

Just like everyone else!

I am currently working with a number of large clients across packaged goods, telecom, financial services and quick serve restaurants who are under the impression they have the messiest pile of data known to man. Sort of like that drawer in the cabinet that houses various mobile phone chargers, ipods cables, laptop leads and game console connectors. There is absolutely no compatability - and thats when you can get them out in one piece without pulling out the others in the first place! Why isn't there a universal charging system? Maybe i'll save that rant for a future post

The thing is, all of these clients are in just the same state as each other. Their legacy systems didn't expect the level of granular data they are getting feeds on today and there was a huge amount of pain and money involved setting them up so they can't walk away from them.

So here's my attempt to reassure you you are not alone with your data challenges - here are the Top 5 issues we see in our everyday work:

1. Definition danger

Marketing, operations and finance all use different names for the same thing, worse still the same term for different things. When the 'sell-in', 'sell-thru' and 'sell-out' reports all show the same numbers its time for a taxonomy

2. PDF proliferation

Data is never available in an easy to understand form. Spreadsheets are poorly labeled and your webtrends report looks like a it was written by your GP. It's life...we have got to live with it

3. IT inertia

Communication between IT and Marketing is like forcing Americans to watch cricket. When the parties don't understand each other the data stays locked away

4. BI blockages

Every system from CRM to Trade are 'made friendlier' by giving you the reporting engine or dashboard. Problem is they only give you one view of the world and excavating the raw data is a nightmare.

5. 'My Turf' management

Bill Hostmann of Gartner puts this well. "Some people in an enterprise apparently aren't really looking for a single version of the truth. It can be easier for them to work with common assumptions and 'dance with numbers' during management meetings". Aligning the organization around a common vision is vital

At this point i won't tell you all how great we are at resolving these problems. But we do better than most. Every marketer wants a 360 degree view of their customers, we want to know that Mrs Smith saw our brand on a billboard on Monday, searched online for products in the category on Tuesday, saw our TV campaign on Friday but bought the competitor brand as a result of a promotion on Saturday. More importantly we need to know what to do to ensure that doesn't happen again.

Was Santa good to you this year?

Blogging is tough! Yeah i know its only been 3 posts and i am complaining already...problem is that i cannot just kill the blog (does it actually qualify as a blog if you have only posted 3 times?), there are 2 reasons for this:

1. They are going to put a link to this on our company website

2. I actually like the idea of blogging

When i started the blog I intended to write a post every friday that was somehow related to something i had been considering over the course of the week. Over the last week there have been no trips to the office, no laptop and no business books. However my most favourite attribute of the Christmas season can act as a stimulus...presents!

So thank you friends and family for the very cool scarf (i surely cannot lose it again!), the engraved pen and the tabletop basketball game. I have to say that i couldn't wait to get back from the trip to the relatives to pick up a book entitled "Pop Charts" which essentially takes all your favourite tunes and creates graphs that depict their sentiment. This book brings out two of my major loves music and being a geek - Genius!

I have to start here; I have always been a big fan of Prince (except when he went through that whole 'sqiggle' phase) and this was an absolute classic!

Everyone loves a map and this has been executed so so well. The beauty is the simplicity

Growing up in the '80s and considering what i do today I have to include this...although fairly generic this has been nicely over-engineered

I nearly choked on my milkshake when i saw this - funny as hell even down to the unformatted excel chart:

Lastly 'The Greatest Rapper Alive' destroyed the UK Glastonbury event in 2008 but the collaboration of chart and lecturer below destroys even Rick Rubin and Jay-Z....love it!

www.GraphJam.com has been churning these out (you can even upload your own) all year long. I urge you all to jump to that link. I have been spending the last 2 hours working my way through the site and i cannot get enough if them. Those of you who want to see the genre amped up should check out The Village Voice's hilarious analysis of MIMs - "This is why I'm hot"

http://www.villagevoice.com/2007-03-06/music/hot-hot-heat/

Perfect in the sense that the song itself is so poor that the graphs took longer to create than the song took to write, produce, release and hit the Billboard Top 10

Please feel free to comment and upload your own "Pop Charts" - enjoy your holidays and have a happy new year!

Risky Business

My daughter and I went to Woolworth's this morning. Woolworth's is a 100 year old UK High Street institution selling CDs, games, toys and stationery. We had a lot of vouchers to spend from previous birthdays and Christmases. We struggled to spend them, Woolworth's is having a fire sale; it's done, kaput - another company forced into administration on the back of the financial crisis

Woolworth's lost its way by losing relevance over a number of years and of course you keep relevant by marketing...isn't that right? Well we can't turn this post into another 'keep your nerve, brands that spend through come out stronger' story - we need another post like that like an Icelandic bank account.

But maybe the world that marketers operate in actually hasn't changed that much as a result of a global meltdown in financial markets? I would suggest that the only thing that has changed is the perception of risk and uncertainty that was always there. So all thats changed is that marketers these days are much less likely to take risks than they were previously.

The point is that marketers are less likely to take on a high-risk high-reward scenario these days. What I am advocating here is that we need to take risk into account when we give our clients advice. Low-risk High reward scenarios are like gold dust...So what should we tell them? Well, how about something like this?:

Let's focus on the top 20% of customers; strengthen the value of our relationship with them and improve their lifetime value. Guess what? they aren't sitting around at home discussing our brand so, if we are going for low-risk low-reward scenarios (at least until the equity markets turn) we need to be right there when they decide to spend THEIR valuable dollars

That leads us to search. Yes, search, that's some potential right there...the ultimate low-risk high reward marketing opportunity. All the brand has to do is turn up. Just turn up and be the number 1 on the list with a message that echoes a human being having their problem solved by our brand. Because if we aren't there...right when they are looking for us they might just think we've gone out of business. It happened to Sharper Image and Woolworth's and no doubt others in the coming months. It's that uncertain a world.

Data Visualization

I have been exposed to and been responsible for some ugly charts in my time and I’m really trying to get my head around data visualization at the moment….i firmly believe it’s how we win in the future, particularly with digital and all the data the cloud will throw up.

Right now, I am loving Edward Tufte’s work in this area. This guy really is wild; his seminal piece is right up there with Nirvana’s “Smells like teen spirit” or Public Enemy’s “It takes a nation of millions to hold us back” – In 1983 he released "The Visual Display of Quantitative Information"…ok it was a book but it was just as controversial. Tufte described himself as being dedicated in turn to "pictures of numbers," "pictures of nouns" and "pictures of verbs". Needless to say I highly recommend his work, and the drugs he was taking.

Tufte tells us that this is “the best statistical graphic ever drawn”!!

I think the chart works at an emotional level. It portrays the army of 600,000 on the left hand side as a powerful river that dwindles to a stream as Moscow is reached on the right hand side. Then, the stream reverses course when Napoleon retreats, and finally becomes a trickle in the end.

Napoleon's Grand Armee was ruined by a combination of extreme weather, disease, starvation, the Cossacks (who basically smacked them down) and the Russian tactic of burning villages before Napoleon arrived, denying the troops food and shelter. The final casualty rate was 97.7%.

In the 25 years since Truft wrote VDQI technology has advanced us in ways we never expected. Truft updated his thinking in “Visual Explanations” in 1997. Even the cool digi kids are banging on about the idea of networks, I constantly hear about “Influencer Network Analysis Charts” - which is “incredible, fantastic…particularly for word of mouth”. Typically these charts look like this:

This, believe it or not is the hierarchical structure of the internet – but what does it tell us? More importantly, what can we do with it?

Recently I stumbled across some really cool stuff. This comes from informationarchitects in Tokyo. It’s called Web Trend Map 3

The map pins down nearly 300 of the most successful and influential websites to the greater Tokyo area train map. This works for me as I am already wired to look at maps like these, I expect connections and popular interchanges (Think Times Square and Kings Cross St Pancras) – I get the information quickly as I don’t have to decode the chart. How many times has a client asked you “So what’s on the x-axis? ”

So imagine a world in which all the work that we did, all those complex concepts we generate and turn into business driving solutions for clients were delivered in much more user friendly formats? We could use everyday items and morph them to give our clients ideas that stick. I can see clocks, computer keyboards, weather maps, restaurant menus and credit cards as presentation devices in the future

It’s long been my professional mantra to take this thing we call ‘marketing analytics’ and make it more accessible. Don’t get me wrong, I love to talk through all the statistical tests over drinks with the rest of you; it’s just that our clients don’t. For the $1tn spent on marketing we operate in a business that barely nets us all $1bn (yes, that’s the whole business…including the data providers and the management consultants) – of course you’ve already worked out that only 0.1% of marketing spend is proven to be accountable. Surely we have to shoulder some of the blame for that?

In Tufte's world, "clear and precise seeing becomes as one with clear and precise thinking." We need clarity and precision more than ever. To think intelligently about anything worth talking about today requires an acute understanding of statistical evidence - whether it's the trade-off between budget deficits and taxation, global warming or spiralling medical costs. So yes, we are the most interesting people at cocktail parties

Understanding our world demands understanding numbers - Under these circumstances, Tufte and informationarchitects’ work can act as a machete to chop through the data jungle.

The End of Binary Thinking

Barack Obama’s win and all the discussion about a “Post-Racial” era in America made me think that we might be entering the end of binary thinking. Which is the why i am titling my new blog "the end of binary thinking"

The fascinating element about Barack Obama is that he is not easily classified in simple, binary terms, especially in regards to his race, upbringing and personal history. He is less the one or the other but sort of like me, a mix of a lot of different things. He is black and white, he is American but he grew up in foreign countries, he is a guy from Chicago but he only moved to Chicago in his twenties, he is an elitist and intellectual but he was a community organizer as well

Most the analytics teams I work with or those guys i meet informally as frenemies think and model in binary terms. It’s either 1 or 0, you are either in segment 1 or in segment 2, the campaign has either worked or not. The origin of this approach resides in the long tradition of philosophy of dualism and binaries. It’s tough to snap out of that, especially for mathematically trained brains who believe that everything can be reduced to a 1 and 0 formula, as any computer program is proof of.

But life is rarely truly binary, and the models that we are building should attempt to reflect this - life more accurate by moving beyond a simple binary structure. It’s often more useful to think less in opposites than in a continuum of elements, less in strong colors than in shades of something. Things are rarely true of false but more often a bit truer or a bit more false.