• Powerball Vs. Moneyball Marketing
    February marks the slow transition from pro football to Major League Baseball, and while dissecting Superbowl advertising and Theo Epstein's off-season maneuvers, my thoughts gave way to a new view of marketing in 2009. I'll characterize it this way: "There are two kinds of marketing executives in the world - Powerball marketers and Moneyball marketers." Chalk my revelation up to sports deprivation, but you have to admit this analogy aptly describes how marketing executives are approaching their jobs this year.
  • Better Ways To Do More With Less
    Crawling around inside a few dozen large marketing and finance organizations these past months, I've seen some evidence of five patterns of "do more with less" that seem to work best.
  • Testing, Testing, Can You Hear Me?
    If you're in an organization with an online presence, the topic of AB and multivariate testing is bound to come up in conversation at some point. Getting a testing program off the ground is not as difficult as it sounds if you take it one step at a time (literally). Here are a few recommendations for getting your testing program up and running.
  • Social Media Monitoring And Measurement
    Social media is a complex space and many companies are just getting their feet wet (yes, still!). The main questions they are asking: If I don't have active social media campaigns, do I still need to measure this space? And what should I expect to get out of it?
  • Analytics Needs IT!
    The classic problem of "marketing versus IT" is real. Based on what I hear from my industry colleagues, the analytics team often has issues with IT resources being sufficiently delegated to supporting a Web analytics implementation and program.
  • Think Ahead While Cutting Back
    Setting aside for the moment the fact that no company can succeed by cutting expenses alone, let's dwell for a moment on the practical necessity of today's world: cut, cut, and cut some more. Yes, we all should have been smart enough to build sufficiently robust measurement capabilities BEFORE the dramatic assault on our budgets began. Yes, we should have put some water in that bucket BEFORE the fire consumed so much of the house that marketing built. But we didn't. So what do we do now that we're caught in the downward cutting spiral? Where do we turn once …
  • Your Star is About to Shine
    If you can look at a commercial enterprise and suggest a logical, measurable way to raise revenues, lower costs and/or increase customer satisfaction -- or just come up with a logical way to test ways to raise revenues, lower costs or increase customer satisfaction -- your time has come. It is your time to shine.
  • Thrilling Real-Life Tales From the Trenches: Panel Data Vs. Server Data
    In a comment on my last contribution to this column, one reader wondered whether, and I'm paraphrasing here, my decision to write these columns with a subjective voice and point of view (that is, the POV of the comScore Chief Research Officer) was appropriate. I thought it was a fair point, but as I indicated in response, this is part-column, part-blog; and as long as my affiliation is sufficiently "disclaimed," best to write what I know. And what I believe. And to let you all keep me honest should that become necessary. So in that spirit, I thought I'd devote …
To read more articles use the ARCHIVE function on this page.