Nancy Smith, global CEO of Analytic Partners has said that she’ll be having a chat with adland agent provocateur Tom Goodwin after his explosive comments about the idea of media mix modelling being “complete nonsense”.
Goodwin told B&T following his talk at ADMA’s Global Forum in Sydney last week that the advertising industry is full of people who spend too much time looking at dashboards and spreadsheets, rather than actually understanding customers and people.
“All I know is that if you sit in a room now, it’s full of people looking at dashboards, it’s full of people talking about numbers, it’s full of people pulling levers,” he said.
“We have things like media mix modelling, the idea that you put things into a thing, crank the handle and it’s complete nonsense. How can you create a media plan when you don’t know what the creative is? How you can create a media plan based on what’s worked in the past when you don’t know what’s now new?”
As part of an exclusive chat — of which more will follow tomorrow — B&T put Goodwin’s comments to Smith, as Analytic Partners is a major player in the space.
“I’m going to have a chat with him! I think I’m at a dinner with him tonight!” she said, laughing.
“He’s absolutely wrong. One of the challenges in our industry is that there has been some commoditisation of MMM [Media Mix Modelling]. There have been some analytics that may not have been robust. There’s been some bad practices in terms of how you leverage those analyses. It’s really easy to say it’s this MMM thing that is causing brands to focus more on the ROI and not on what the customer needs. I think that’s probably what he means.
“You might say ‘I’m going to play around with these numbers and I’m going to plan without thinking about the customer.’ That’s the wrong way to do it. As a matter of fact, I would argue that what MMM used to be done shouldn’t be done any more. It really needs to be elevated to a more commercial understanding because marketing doesn’t exist in a vacuum.”
Goodwin’s comments caused something of a stir online. Mat Baxter, APAC CEO of market mix modelling firm and white-hot startup Mutinex, posted on LinkedIn that Goodwin was “flat out wrong” in his assessment.
“Quite frankly, it’s your sort of mindset that sets our industry back and makes serious people like CEOs and CFOs see marketers as the ‘colouring in brigade,'” Baxter continued.
“Essentially you are asserting that marketing and media is not a quantifiable (or accountable) commercial variable but instead some sort of intangible creative “vibe” that should just be blindly trusted. That’s simply not true mate.
“I’m all for throwing grenades but I reckon this is one of the most reckless that’s been lobbed in a while.”
“One of the biggest challenges in the industry is how to leverage analytics, or as we call it, how to turn data to expertise. That’s our mission — on which I founded the company almost 25 years ago,” continued Smith.
“That word ‘expertise’ is real important because it’s about how to leverage the analytics to make decision, not to follow them down a rabbit hole and not to do instead of strategy and customer work. It’s how you use it as an aid or a guide post.”
Goodwin, for his part, has not backed down from his statement. Goodwin replied to Baxter’s LinkedIn post:
“We could scan in every grand master and we could study what seems to make some paintings more valuable than others. We could find out that some Ochres or Blues or some compositions or some sizes of paintings work best. This would be statistically true. We could get more and more data and be more accurate.
“This data wouldn’t be a very good way for most people to paint.
“It would be a good sense check, it would be a robust way to defend actions, it wouldn’t be wrong or useless but it wouldn’t capture the complex reality of an industry.
“At the end of the day all these things come down to having informed, supported, logical conversations, and MMM like many tools isn’t right but it is helpful, it’s not setting us up for failure but neither is it offering as much help as we may think.
“These days we over-index on using data to fall back on and blame not illuminate and help us do better. I think we need to be more demanding of what data can do, and seek out as robust and helpful data as we can. All too often something like MMM leads to missed opportunities and false promises.
“The answer to all hard questions in marketing is ‘it depends’.”
Separately, he also posted: “At some point we need to understand that things like art, music, design, marketing, packaging, aren’t best understood or driven by data, even though they can be measured in countless ways, and data turned into something that looks like it’s prescriptive.
“In the modern world anything can be turned into data, anything can be tortured to find meaning, but that doesn’t mean experience, instinct or judgment isn’t helpful, all data really allows is something to take the blame for making average logical work.”
