From Election Campaigns to Media Campaigns – Big Data Delivers - Christopher Hansen

I was watching CBS Sunday Morning this past weekend They had a story on Nate Silver NYT blogger and numbers geek While the movie Moneyball was not exactly about him he once worked in the MLB scouting players using statistics I have to admit I am a bit fascinated with the guy for becoming infamous as a quant and props for being a fellow BrooklyniteThey started the piece showing coverage of the 1952 election featuring Walter Cronkite and a UNIVAC computer It was the first time the audience was exposed to an election quotexpertquot that was not human and the unit was a big clunky thing In the modern day evolution we have reporters like Wolf Blitzer working with slick minority report level data mechanics pulling up real time results complete with computer graphics at the touch of a button on CNN and the major networksThen they did a broad stroke of Silver39s model for predicting the outcome of the election Intrigued I could not help but find a strong correlation to what so many of us do today data modeling real time bidding RTB the crossreferencing of ad tech39s version of Big DataWith elections models feed in data from the various polls conducted across the nation I remember when there were only few polls amp8211 Gallup Marist and so on Now there are dozens The Silver model analyzes past performance of these polls in previous elections amp8211 as well as feeding in other data points The result is a fairly accurate prediction of the electionThen and now with the results proven on Election Day amp8211 I felt incredibly reinforced for all that we believe and toil in the realms of RTB It lent credence to the math and the mechanics of our modeling For it sounded to me a lot like the dataled world where we do business we take in data from the various data sources that we have amp8211 site data audience data website visitor profiles amp8211 and apply additional data such as seasonality time of day within our algorithms to predict an outcome A RTB bid decision may seem small in comparison with MLB and presidential election outcomes but you can see the accuracy and potential brought on by the age of Big Data Moneyball election prediction RTB Netflix the universe in which we live and operate is powered by predictive algorithmsIt39s worth noting that Silver was a thorn in the side of all the bobble headed pundits who spent months discussing the electionamp8211 analyzing every stump speech every moment of every debate every swing state swing And none of it mattered The individual polls themselves didn39t matter many still had Romney leading the day of the election Silver using data proved the pundits wrong before Election Day took placeIn our business think of all the decisions being made by media planners and buyer based on anecdotal information and bias Or those perilous quotfocus groups of onequot based on their own consumer experience 39I ran a retail campaign on this publisher and it worked so let me run this car campaign there39 39I like the guy at this network so let me give him first crack at an RFP amp8211 he never steers me wrong39 Or 39performance looks pretty good but I need to spread out the buy because that is what the client wants39 Just like the pundits there is always subjectivity blinding our decisions But if you look at the data the answer is there with some reliability and accuracyLive on the mighty models of ad tech and audience targeting UNIVAC actually got it right back in 1952 Nate Silver got it right in 2012Christopher Hansen is the President of Netmining

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From Election Campaigns to Media Campaigns – Big Data Delivers - Christopher Hansen

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From Election Campaigns to Media Campaigns – Big Data Delivers - Christopher Hansen

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