Easton Analytics

The above image is a list of 'a handful' of companies working in the Marketing Technology space. Only about 8% of them are very large, but as you will notice, a slew of them are in Data.  Within Data, there are always new niche players coming up with neat visualizations tools. However, I will address just a few of the large players today. TABLEAU Much has been said about the benefits of Tableau as a data visualization tool, particularly for large datasets.  It is certainly a wonderful software once you learn to use it, the drag and drop interface makes it super easy to handle.  Unlike basic Excel, Tableau can work with extremely large amounts of data, and can analyze that data very quickly into highly interactive graphs, charts, and geographic visualizations.  The availability of heat mapping and color coding to illustrate vast amounts of data across a geography is perhaps one of my favorite features. Notably, Tableau doesn't work with unstructured data well, as oth

Ultimately the end game of a marketer using data is to monetize that data.  Of course there are more or less direct methods to make a case using data; they vary in degree of complexity and investment to acquire.  They might also require teaming up with a data analyst or data scientist.  The most important point to remember is that you have to know what question you're trying to answer, you can just browse and expect to get a simple solution.  There are almost always a confluence of factors either determining or related to the problem at hand and determining causation vs. relation is an important human-level of the analysis the requires logic and experience with the subject matter. Here is a list of common ways to monetize data. 1.  Data can be used for predictive analysis to determine when customers are most likely to be shopping and on which of their devices. 2. Data can be used to segment customers by what types of products they are most likely to purchase.  Companies can d

In 1790 the Pennsylvania state constitution called for publicly funded education for poor students.  The assumption was that wealthier families would fund their own children's education, and that it would be superior to the public offering.  A decade before that Thomas Jefferson had proposed a two track education system, one that provided different tracks for the "laborers and the learned,"  which would be designed, in Jefferson's own words, to "rake a few geniuses from the rubbish."  Mind you this was in the time of slavery and indentured servitude, so the assumption that students had finite and largely low-level capabilities and that this might warrant their station in life wasn't the least bit controversial.  Coincidentally, this aligned with the prejudice that only land owners be allowed a vote in the new world.  It was only with the eventual adoption of publicly-funded education across the country and in the 1940's the introduction of compulsory

I really enjoyed reading Kaitlyn Nastro's blog post this week entitled, " Is Data that Great? " Kaitlyn challenges the authority of algorithms as they are increasingly applied in modern life, particularly to business situations.  She points out that Big Data comes down to numbers, and "sometimes numbers are wrong, sometimes numbers don't tell a story, or provide reason."  In other words, using algorithms can result in recommendations that don't jive with human judgment or that result in abject error. We cannot forget that algorithms are made by man.  Which brings up another interesting point, and my reason for blogging on this topic as well.  What happens when all of our latest technological breakthroughs are based on a methodology that is modeled after man's vision of the world, as well as, at least initially, our way of thinking?  Do we produce something that is way smarter than us but still deeply flawed, as we are? How will we know when to let

My father went into the ER a few weeks ago.  I later learned its better to go to a teaching hospital for unusual symptoms, and a local hospital for run of the mill stuff where an ER doctor might do those procedures several times a day.  But how, when Dad appears to have sudden onset dementia, or a stroke, are you supposed to know that going in the door, and why aren't hospitals referring you to ensure the best care when they come across something outside their ability to immediately diagnose and treat? After a service and diagnosis failure at the first hospital, and an inability to do further testing within 36hrs, my parents headed home.  It took nearly 24hrs for us to convince them to go to an academic hospital (and to learn that that'd be a good next step ourselves), and for the next round of testing to begin.  There was no major stroke, or dementia, but after another 24-36hrs there was a perfectly reasonable cascade effect that resulted in blood poisoning, as a result of o

There's been a lot of talk about AI recently, and I'll admit it, I'm officially caught up in it, and shamelessly so.  A few recent examples, and I will have to come back to add the third because it is suddenly slipping my mind: AI is being trained to write scripts, as it did recently based on  the Knight Rider sitcom.  The body of scripts from Knight Rider was analyzed, and a new scripted based off of that, but written by an AI, was developed.  David Hasselhoff even collaborated on the project reading the lines for his character.  To read more about that, click  here .  Its nowhere near replacing the Hollywood Writer's Guild, but its possible that using AI could help them identify more salient themes to explore in their content ideation. Smart cars. Okay, I'll admit I'm not that interested as a consumer. I like driving too much. That said, they are an ideal solution for elderly folks who are a growing portion of the population. Now, these may not seem li

Deep pockets come in handy once again. On April 28th Ikea's external innovation lab, called Space10, launched a consumer survey online and at locations in Barcelona, to discover what people are thinking about artificial intelligence.  The results are sure to guide not only Ikea's future product innovations, in-store shopping experiences, external business investments, but also perhaps 'smart furniture' advances for the industry as a whole. The survey is a rather creative, and academic approach to online consumer research.  It is introduced with a set of conceptual frameworks for AI that we are already familiar with today, but that most consumers have little personal experience with. The consumer is is asked to speculate on their own future preferences.   What would you want from AI?  Human personality, guidance on how to live or do things, robotic personality, male/female gender identification, what type of attitude,  do you want the system to grow with you, and mim