The Nerds Have Won, And Will Continue Winning

Cut It Fine

This month in my free time -- well, the time stolen from sleeping -- I'll prepare for my fantasy baseball draft. It's something that I've done for much of my adult life, and the way it has changed over the years has been fairly interesting. The game itself has changed dramatically over time, from the steroid and easy hitter parks of previous decades to today's pitcher-centric era. There used to be 40-home run per year hitters; now, you're lucky to get to 30. Starting pitchers used to get to complete games more than rarely; now, almost never. The best relief pitchers used to be the guys that closed the games, and now, not always. And so on, and so on. But that's not the point I'm looking to make here, nor the reason why this has anything to do with marketing and advertising.

What you are trying to do in a fantasy sports league isn't to get the most hitters that break a certain home run threshold, or starting pitchers with the most complete games, or even the "best" team. Rather, you are trying to achieve results above the median, and to have those results culminate in a best in class performance. (Sounds like fun, doesn't it?)

That's never really changed for fantasy players, but what's new is how that mindset has worked its way into the game itself. "Moneyball" wasn't just an influential book and rather well-regarded movie; it really was a clarion call to how a market that was less than perfect in its efficiency was, well, going to become a lot more competitive.

Now, the growth metric and talent evaluation in baseball isn't on base level counting statistics. Instead, it's in percentages above the median, increasingly esoteric evaluations of fielding and defense (especially in how catchers "frame" pitches), base running benefits that go beyond just stealing bases, and so on, and so on. 

Back to our world.

It's rare, in today's digital marketing environment, that you'll just run a single channel or medium, and absolutely know the impact of the campaign. Emails inspire search results, which feed banner response, which rolls into your social media campaigns, and so on, and so on. So simple metrics like open and click rates, or even more powerful ones like revenue tracked by channel, may not give you the full story of what's working, and what isn't... or, more importantly, what's working, but only 20 to 30% as well as it should be, and might be easily actionable.

Which means that, just like in baseball, the role of the people who can recognize talent, or do game-changing things, is not all that different from what it was before. It's just being supplemented by increasingly complex analytical exercises, for the plain and simple reason that this is where the wins will come from. 

That, and a fairly strong amount of luck, in regards to who gets hurt and when. (OK, maybe baseball and marketing aren't quite the same after all.)

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