Words, Numbers, And Bill James

Credit Where Due

Sometimes, I run into people in a professional context, and when they get the gist of what I do, they don't understand how it came to be. Most people have a clear concept of who and what a copywriter is -- someone who sweats over words as if people still read, or ever really liked to do that. That person is supposed to have a massive amount of books in their life, a seeming disregard for designers, and their head in the clouds as they think about Big Ideas and how words can bring them home. Close your eyes and picture this person, and you've probably got patches on the elbows, paper everywhere, and all kinds of things to spur creativity in the work space. Or whatever cliche of writer works for you.

Now, analysis. Very different person, right? Lives in spreadsheets, dreams of automating the copy with machine intelligence, would have gone into accounting but needed just a hair more excitement in their life. If they gamble, it's poker, and it's with a disturbing ability to calculate odds, to the point of making sure the game is no fun at all. The work environment is austere and severe, they are efficient to the point of obsessiveness, and so on. You might trust them to run your stock portfolio or pick your fantasy sports team, but consult on your creative? Never!

How can you get both of these people at once?

Well, more importantly, how can you not?

Creatives who don't look at the numbers -- any numbers, so long as they have statistical significance -- are flying blind, and doing that without even owning the plane. Analytics people who don't look at the art are missing the chance to diagnose the work and solve problems in ways that clients can truly appreciate, because the lessons learned are rarely something that doesn't have legs outside of the immediate project. Combine both, and you get a learning engine, and learning engines are the only way, in my opinion, that you can hope to keep getting better at your gig. (And staffing for both roles just means conflict and complication, and in the start ups where I've usually worked, isn't realistic.)

As for how you get this way... well, beyond the sheer usefulness of it all, I credit Bill James.

James, for those of you who are not afflicted with the sports problem, is a wildly influential writer and analyst who set out to learn the intricacies of baseball. Rather than just accept conventional wisdom about what kinds of players were best, James dug into the numbers, discovered all kinds of actionable learning points, and was eventually proven right, over and over again, with the sport more or less taking his work and amplifying it. If you've seen "Moneyball", you've seen the impact of James.

To me, James was just a voice in a book that told me it was OK to think about sports, rather than just watch and react to them. That in thinking about these things, it was also possible to learn things that others did not know, and that in writing about them, to bring the art back in. (James is, at his best, a flat out terrific writer, and some of his stuff has stayed with me for decades.)

Thinking about stuff that others do not can be time consuming and debilitating, but it can also be very lucrative. I recommend it.

To my fellow writers... stop being afraid of analysis, and analysts. They are here to help, and if your copy doesn't need help, you are a very, very special unicorn. To my analytical brethren, dabbling in creative is more fun than you might think, and if you can develop the knack of giving actionable feedback to creatives, they will love you forever. And invite you to wildly better parties than you would get to on your own.

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