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A Marketer’s Survival Guide to Reporting with Big Data
Early Signs of the Apocalypse Should Not Be Ignored
So. The data apocalypse is already here.
I remember the moment I understood the world had shifted. It was during the eighth hour-long inter-department meeting, asking if we had data that answered a very, very specific question. The answer was simple. No.
“Why don’t we have this?! What can we do to get it right away?!
There must be more data. There MUST. We need more data. Daaaaataaaaa.”
Replace the long drawl for “data” with the word “brains” and you have a good picture of how off-putting it felt to suddenly look around and realize — we were surrounded. Surrounded not by the run-of-the-mill brain-hungry zombies (those are easy to handle). Oh no, we were surrounded by what I can only describe as a new professional malady. One specific to marketers and the stakeholders they work with. A “data zombie” plague had broken out within our business. And the infection was taking hold fast.
How did we know there was something wrong? Well for one thing, it was quickly apparent that the hunger for data had suddenly gone past a real need. Rather than a tool to help inform critical thinking and problem-solving for our business’s needs, it had become a singular, ravenous obsession.
Traditional zombies are driven by their cravings for brains; data zombies are driven by cravings for more and more data. What they both share is that they are without the capacity to reflect on the why, or care about the how.
Like a zombie’s appetite for human flesh; businesses’ hunger for data can overwhelm their thinking, making them unable to reflect on what’s really driving the hunger to begin with.
This is the horde we were facing now. Our colleagues were no longer our colleagues — they had turned into full-fledged “data zombies.” And they were hungry.
