"There are three kinds of lies: lies, damned lies, and statistics" – Mark Twain
Five years ago today (September 1, 2019), my family and I stepped off the plane from Seattle to Heathrow, having spent the previous month frantically packing our belongings, saying goodbye to friends, and preparing to pick up our life in the UK, almost thirteen years after we left in 2006. But it was only when I returned last month for a visit that I felt the time had come to say goodbye to the city.
The 2010s were a big decade for Chief Data Officers: from a standing start ten years ago, CDO has risen to become an indispensable C-suite role, with almost two thirds of Fortune 500 organizations hiring one.
But the role of CDO, especially outside the US, is still poorly defined, and CDOs are frequently not set up for success within their organizations. Is the job a poisoned chalice?
I’ve been a member of the Digital Analytics Association for, it turns out, about twelve years – over half my professional life. In that time I’ve seen the organization grow and blossom into a vibrant community of professionals who are passionate about the work they do and about helping others to develop their own skills … Read more
Accurate multichannel campaign attribution has stumped the online marketing industry for years. But what if the solution is to stop worrying about attribution, and move to an optimization-driven approach?
Read moreSolving the attribution conundrum with optimization-based marketing
It’s been a busy couple of years here at Microsoft. For the dwindling few of you who are keeping track, at the beginning of 2012 I took a new job, running our “Big Data” platform for Microsoft’s Online Services Division (OSD) – the division that owns the Bing search engine and MSN, as well as … Read more
Some interesting news today: Google has fully launched the cloud-based BigQuery service that it first previewed last November. From the website: Google BigQuery is a web service that lets you do interactive analysis of massive datasets—up to billions of rows. Scalable and easy to use, BigQuery lets developers and businesses tap into powerful data analytics … Read more
It’s usually my lovely wife who blogs about jewelry, and me who blogs about charts and data, but today the tables are turned – well, almost. Wieden+Kennedy London has come up with a range of designer necklaces which celebrate the beauty of data, under the name Plot. The necklaces use charts of thirty years of … Read more
This, as it turns out: Ah, Mrs Thomas, you know me too well. The only problem with it is that it’s just too perfect to actually eat. As you’ll have no doubt already worked out just by looking at it, it’s made of 70% milk, 20% dark and 10% white chocolate. From the wonderful … Read more
Those smarty-smart smart people at Stanford (which gave us Sergey and Larry, Sun, and, ahem, Jerry) have developed some software to make it possible to insert dynamic images or videos inside the environment of another video. I’m not talking about pre-rolls, post-rolls or overlays here; the inserted images/movies (which could of course be ads) are … Read more
This will cheer you up – the world’s first Excel-based music video (I kid you not): [Via adfreak]