• by January 3, 2006

Do you hear that sound, echoing from somewhere out in the ether of the media world? It's author Malcolm Gladwell letting out a great big "Ugh!" Why do I suppose Mr. Gladwell is giving a bemused sigh? Because the best-selling author of The Tipping Point and Blink seems to understand the challenge I face, along with my colleagues in other agencies, as we begin the process of creating dashboards for our clients.

The media industry is entering an era of unprecedented data collection. On the digital side, we collect campaign information down to the impression level, meaning that we can analyze the details and impact of a single impression out of 10 billion served. Imagine that we marry all of that data with TV, print, and radio activity, client point-of-sale data, competitive spending, direct-mail drops, and awareness surveys, and tally it across multiple brands, geographies, and business units. Feed all those gigabytes into a business intelligence solution and what do you get? A dashboard, or central reporting interface.

In his recent book, Blink, Gladwell proposes that the best and fastest decision making is often done by those who know what the few critical data points are. He refers to this as the "power of thin slicing." And, in essence, that is exactly what a dashboard is supposed to help managers do. It should report on those essential elements that will mean life or death to a brand or business unit's advertising objectives. But that's the Catch-22, isn't it? We need to collect all the data to figure out what's important. But how can we focus on what's important when we are deluged with data and information? That is the big "ugh."

A multitude of forces are moving media agencies toward centralized reporting across all media channels. First and foremost are the clients who are tired of receiving a report for each media activity: one for broadcast, online, direct mail, e-mail, print, etc. The industry has been selling the notion of integrated planning and buying, so it only seems natural that we should provide portfolio reporting.

Next are the media planners who spend hours cobbling together reports in Excel. They're looking for report automation that will allow them to focus more on strategy than on pulling campaign numbers. Then there are the agencies that want to create normative statistics based on all the historical data across every channel for every client.

The value of automated databases (i.e., pipelines into a central server) is undeniable. Reporting becomes faster, more accurate, holistic, and dynamic. This means clients and agencies can disaggregate the numbers any way they wish. If only for this reason, I predict that the industry will move to dashboard reporting in less than two years. For those of us who are already well into dashboard development, the question we should all be asking is how to design these systems in such a way that they allow us (and our clients) to become faster, better media decision makers.

You can fully understand this challenge when faced with the terror of the blank page -- when you have pulled client data across five channels and 15 metrics for 10 brands and you have to decide what goes into the dashboard report. The irony is that clients and planners want access to everything, because the supposition is that more data is better. But when confronted with every option for analysis, most people really only want a thin slice -- the key elements that drive media investment. We can articulate what some of these are, usually such metrics as cost per thousands, that we use to determine campaign success. But as Gladwell notes in Blink, we can't always explain the heuristic that we follow to make good decisions. We call it intuition or a gut feeling, but it's the uncharted process that we often take in subconsciously, choosing to pay attention to certain variables while discarding the rest based on experience and wisdom.

Creating client dashboards is a slow, painstaking process and collaboration. Ugh! But just pulling all the data together into a central server isn't enough. We need to run regressions to identify contributors to success. We need to talk to planners, buyers, and clients to discover the crucial elements to display. It's a learning process for the entire media industry, and it may very well engender new types of research and science around decision making. But until we identify the elusive data points, the full potential of dashboards will remain unrealized.