Making Your Own Fun, With Numbers

Dave Atell Rules

This week at my gig, I've gone into serious nerdery as an analyst... all in the pursuit of making something simple for the end user. Taking inspiration from the sabermetric baseball analysis that first fired my imagination as a kid, I'm attempting to role up a myriad number of metrics into one index. The goal is to give my co-workers and clients something where they don't have to deal with all of the complexity, but still get a sense of what makes for a better and worse campaign, both in its own category and as a global performer. It's been a ton of number crunching along with heavy thought processes, and there are times when I just have to get up and take a walk, before my eyes get fixated and my brain fogs up.

It's very different from past gigs, but the reason why it's fun -- and yeah, hours with numbers can, honestly, be fun -- is because I'm learning new things about our consumers and clients, and what I learn today frequently opens up something new I can learn tomorrow. There's also the fact that I'm learning not just from what our internal teams are doing, but also what runs through our pipes that originated in outside sources.

I can't get into the absolute details of this, of course, because that's proprietary, and something you need to be a client to learn. But what I've got is a mix of right and left brain, numbers producing actionable creative moves, creative moves creating discernible differences in analytics.

This isn't the first time I've had this kind of professional experience, and honestly, once you've had it, you pretty much don't ever want to work a gig that doesn't offer that opportunity. I'll even go one further. If you are at a company that's at a certain headcount or early stage in its evolution, you might need this kind of learning engine... and if you don't have it, you're probably not going to make it in the long run. (There have been gigs where you would think that you were going to get this, but the reality was less than that, mostly because of shortfalls in other teams.)

The key, of course, is actionable insight, from statistically significant sample sizes, and in aspects you can replicate at scale -- and to not lose your edge from the number work. These aren't easy to find, but they are out there, especially in industries that aren't at the forefront of innovation. Or, that you can port from other consumer categories.

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