Lions and Bears and Metrics, Oh My!

Now don't get me wrong, some of my best friends push performance metrics. O.k., none of my best friends do and when I find some pencil sharpening, numbers lover at an event, I run the other way.

It's not that I don't believe in statistics. I am a true believer that history repeats itself and that 4 out of 5 dentists is indeed 80%. I just have a hard time with statistics for several reasons.

Statistically speaking, people are liers. We know that most of the time people lie when they are asked their opinions, so a great deal of energy goes into making tricky evaluations that are designed to circumvent this need for us all to lie - about our weight, penis size and how much we make.

Believe it or not, I did my stint way back when, running an open-ended coding station for a market research company. Before we had all this computing power, it was hard to deal with an infinite number of choices to questions. A small sampling of people would generate a number of choices and then those would turned into the proverbial a, b, c or d and thus we got our answers. Boy how things have changed. I believe there is now an analytics anal probe for those in need of true micro management.

Now, I find myself constantly fighting the numbers. Somebody in a cheap suit is waving a spreadsheet telling me that radio doesn't work, nobody buys newspapers and that all my precious effort in creating a t.v. spot is going to get Tivoed away.

All too infrequently, analytics fails to report back the simple fact that if the message isn't there, it won't work.

Maybe the name of the business is at fault. Perhaps it's too hard to spell or sounds like something else or too hard to remember or just doesn't stand out in whatever media is being used.

Maybe the business is so bad at what it does that no amount of advertising will overcome the bad reputation they have. (Years later, try selling Coors beer to a Gay bar in San Francisco)

In particular there is a lot of bad advertising - radio, t.v. print, new media and lots of people who will upload the worst piece of drek to Youtube thinking it will be downloaded 4 million or so times causes a new billion dollar brand.

So here's what I say about the numbers. Too many unqualified people doing everything. Too many morons in charge. Too many people panicked about not being politically correct enough. Too many people saying that too many people... and not enough people paying attention.

What are your thoughts?