It is unlikely you know of English poet Samuel Coleridge but you might know (at least parts) of his most famous poem. The Rime of the Ancient Mariner was penned in the late 18th century and includes the well-known and often uttered stanza:
Water, water, everywhere,
Nor any drop to drink.
I have found myself drawing a cognitive parallel between the woe of Coleridge’s sailor and the status of data use in popular news culture and our own marketing profession. I made this potentially unusual connection after in the same day reading one more (and my they are endless) national favorability polls of current 2016 Presidential candidates, AND an analysis of Facebook “likes” by geography about the same! Both were among the latest examples of faux or what might be termed “No-Nothing Metrics” that predominate in national news cycles, political discourse and the like.
What do I mean? First, as any third-grader knows, the American Presidency is not selected by a national popular vote—it is selected by the state electoral college. Winning the popular vote on a state-by-state basis is what propels one to the White House, not national voting sentiment. This point is hardly new—so why are such polls so breathlessly and endlessly reported as a point that is significant? Or how about the recent publication (from a site often lauded here) of Facebook “likes” by geography? Treating the universe of Facebook “likers” as somehow reflective of American Presidential voters and their projected preferences is a leap of logic so big that it perverts any claims about legitimate political or public opinion purposes.
Such idiosyncratic comparisons might be great to fuel some over-latte chatter but they do little to provide insight about the topic at hand. Why not divide voters with ginger-hair from those without and report a similar result? Or how about arraying candidate support by preferred pizza toppings? When readers learn the pepperoni and mushroom crowd is wild about Bernie Sanders, what do we do with it all?
Such is the state of metrics (even sometimes legitimate metrics) in contemporary elections and politics and the mind-numbing trend of it all is worsening at a rapid rate. But I have more bad news: this pernicious trend is also unfolding in the marketing world.
Our profession continues to struggle with adopting any form of metric standardization in virtually any area. Some in the marcom world continue to mouth the old chestnut that “soft” communication behavior can’t be measured (which is pure bunk). Others construct contorted dashboards that are applicable to only a single situation. Hell, we can’t even agree on a method by which to measure a brand’s “digital reach.” Do you know of a single website evaluative measurement that has become de riguer in assessing a client’s website and is used widely in our profession? I don’t.
What’s potentially worse is that in our world the price of flailing about (with almost as many different metrics as there are things to be measured) is exceedingly high. When a cable news operation or political campaign undertakes such a dubious effort, it can be both partially dismissed and seen for what it often is—just one additional attempt to fill voracious programming holes or the self-serving advancement of a candidate.
But as marketers we don’t have such a luxury. Presumably, we measure something because we wish to learn, or track or more narrowly gauge the “result” of some pre-planned behavior. Often the essence of our very business rests on such effort. These aims compel us to use measures and create some context of these measures that are scalable, transferable across many different situations and repeatable. As professionals, we continue to badly fail on this matter. Perhaps had Coleridge seen the digital era in American marketing he might opine:
Data, data everywhere,
Nor any knowledge to be had.
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John Durante is the marketing services director for WordWrite Communications. He can be reached at john.durante@wordwritepr.com.
