The Russians are reading Precision Marketing. A case of these books arrived yesterday from my publisher. At first, I didn’t even realize it was a translation of my book. It then took me a while to figure out what language it was. I had to do a lot of asking around. I felt like Denzel Washington in that scene from “Inside Man” where he’s blasting a recording in a foreign language to passersby on a busy street corner in a desperate attempt to determine the ethnic origin of those nefarious kidnappers.
Speaking of Russia, I just published an article on marketing dashboards and data visualization tools that begins with a discussion of a thematic map of Napoleon’s ill-fated march from the Polish-Russian border to Moscow. (Of the more than 614,000 troops that embarked on the campaign, only 50,000 survived.) The map, by the French civil engineer Charles Joseph Minard, appears in Edward Tufte’s classic book The Visual Display of Quantitative Information.
I attended a talk by Tufte a long time ago. Clearly, it made a lasting impression. By the way, he actually sells posters of the map, although I’m not sure it’s something I personally would want to hang over my sofa.
In researching the article, I was fortunate to interview a number of leading experts on data visualization. Ultimately what I learned was that the market is still in its infancy but that the near-term growth potential is huge now that we're seeing the alignment of all the planets—from marketing accountability to data integration to software technology.
The explosion in data visualization over the next couple of years will be largely due to the significant improvements of rich Internet applications, as seen, for example, in the new versions of Adobe Flex and Flash. These will make it possible to bring any data set—including those related to precision marketing performance—to life in a dazzling array of color-coded charts, funnels, pies, spider webs and other configurations that can be navigated and manipulated in countless ways. The experts agree that the power of next-generation dashboards lies largely in the ability to interact with data to reveal hidden patterns, connections, and insights.
According to Al Gore’s movie, which should be mandatory viewing for all 300 million Americans, a different set of experts agree that global warming is real and that immediate action needs to be taken to halt and reverse it. Gore relies heavily on data visualization to drive home many of his key points. Let’s hope political and business leaders pay heed, lest we continue down a path even more devastating than the one down which Napoleon led his troops during that Russian winter of 1812.
Comments