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Marketing gets measured
Marketing used to look like Mad Men: smart, creative people sitting around thinking, with midday scotch and very little that was quantitative about it. Then money shifted from print and TV to digital, and people realized that digital can be measured. Click-through rates, performance, and the return on each initiative could all be counted.
Baseball went through the same change in Michael Lewis's book Moneyball, where Billy Beane of the Oakland A's moved scouting and team building from qualitative judgment to deep, esoteric statistics. Marketing got moneyballed in the same way, and many of the CMOs at enterprise companies now come from demand generation and performance rather than brand and communications.
Product and crypto follow
Product management is following. Product managers used to survey a few people, come up with something, build it, and ship it, with no feedback beyond focus groups. Now that software is delivered as a service, teams can see what users do in the product and what causes someone to retain or churn. Amplitude is built around measuring exactly that.
Crypto forensics is another case. Tracing criminals' transactions used to be qualitative and investigative. Chainalysis collects the data exhaust that blockchains produce and analyzes it for financial services firms and governments, surfacing where money laundering or tumbling might be happening.
Why can digital ads be measured so closely?
Every ad impression and click passes through software that logs it, usually with a timestamp and an identifier for the browser or device. Tracking pixels and cookies can connect a click to a purchase made later. Print and television had no such link, so advertisers relied on sampled audience estimates such as Nielsen ratings. A single online campaign can now be broken down by audience, ad, and hour.
How did Moneyball change baseball?
Billy Beane's Oakland A's built their roster around statistics like on-base percentage, which the market undervalued compared with traditional scouting measures. Michael Lewis published Moneyball in 2003, after the A's won 20 games in a row in 2002. The book spread the approach well beyond Oakland. The Boston Red Sox hired the statistician Bill James as an adviser in 2003.
How do blockchains leave a trail for investigators?
Public blockchains such as Bitcoin record every transaction permanently on a shared ledger that anyone can read. Addresses are pseudonymous, but analysts can group addresses that are likely controlled by the same party. Mixing services, also called tumblers, pool coins from many users to break that link. Because the ledger is permanent, a transaction made years ago can still be traced.
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