Omniture Articles

Marketing In The Age Of Math

I read with excitement the excellent BusinessWeek cover story of January 23, “Math Will Rock Your World.” In it, the author points out that the world is moving into a new age of numbers. Just as the marriage of higher math and computer modeling transformed science and engineering in past decades, and as luminary mathematicians (or “quants”) turned finance upside down a generation ago, math is now revolutionizing marketing.

In such an atmosphere, math geeks are the new elite, commanding and landing jobs with six–figure salaries, right out of school. And that’s a problem.

For starters, few companies can afford to hire those six–figure marketers. And even if they could afford them, those quants are nearly impossible to find. Equally important, many quants may be too deeply immersed in the scientific aspect of marketing and not well–versed enough on marketing as an art.

The successful use of math can vault a company to the top of its vertical market, or help it stay there: look at Ford, who used math to discover how much of its budget should be spent on internet marketing versus other media, or at online lender E–Loan which successfully manages a portfolio of 250,000 keywords and phrases, an initiative on which it spends $15 million per year.

But there is a risk. Years ago, I participated in a test for a shoe retailer that used advanced statistics to determine what products and product lines to show prospects on site pages. After four months of testing and analysis, we reached relatively precise recommendations. But the conclusions aged poorly. The precision of the analysis became an indulgence, not an advantage.

Products change, people change, the marketplace changes, and just throwing “math” at the problem biased precision over relevance.

Luckily, the market has advanced, and any company can now participate in the math revolution while avoiding the twin perils of resourcing and relevance. Tools now exist that give companies the Ph.D. level of sophistication described in the BusinessWeek article without requiring them to hire employees at that analytical level or salary range.

Services like Efficient Frontier, Tribal Voice, and Offermatica all offer different forms of advanced statistics and analysis to bring PhD–level math into the online marketer’s cubicle.

Beyond being accessible to a marketing team, tools such as these have another factor in their favor: they’re fast, and that’s of vital importance in the marketing industry.

Speed in numbers is important. So is accessibility.

As I pointed out to Stephen Baker in a brief letter to the editor:

“Victory is not just making advanced statistics and optimization possible for a quant, but to make it accessible to the type of person [a marketer] can afford to hire. Marketing lives on the back of 26–year–olds making much, much less.”

And, as Baker pointed out in return, “…this means there's a giant market opportunity for companies who build sophisticated math tools for unschooled users.” That’s what Google has accomplished in a big way, he wrote.

That’s what companies such as Efficient Frontier are doing in a much quieter, but equally valid, way. And, of course, that’s what Offermatica does, as well.