The “Moneyball” of marketing?
In Brad Pitt’s latest box-office venture, he plays Billy Beane, the general manager of the Oakland A’s. Beane uses sabermetrics, a type of statistical analysis that places more emphasis on a player’s contributions to his team’s success than sexy numbers like homeruns and batting average. With the help of his Yale-educated assistant, Beane applied these oft-ignored player statistics to assemble a winning team at a fraction of the cost of what most big-market teams spend. This translated into a 103-win season for the Oakland A’s, much to the surprise of so-called baseball experts and general managers with payrolls of over $100 million.
Can using statistics that most mainstream advertisers overlook help create more successful and cheaper campaigns for clients? Dan Neely, the co-founder and CEO of Networked Insights, thinks so. He calls his business the “Moneyball” for marketing because of the way it uses key social data to help clients spend their advertising money smarter and more effectively. For example, one of his clients wanted to reach television viewers of “Sunday Night Football.” Ad space during this program was unsurprisingly expensive. However, company researchers discovered that many football viewers were flipping to “Walking Dead” on AMC between ads. Commercials during this program were much less expensive, and the company recommended that the client buy ad space on AMC instead, at a 68% reduction in cost. Research allowed the client to buy smarter and reach the same target audience.
“There are rich teams, and there are poor teams. Then there’s 50 feet of crap. And then there’s us,” Pitt says in the film as the brutally honest A’s GM. He knows his team with its paltry $40 million payroll can’t throw money at star players the way the Yankees can with their $126 million and lucrative New York market. His team can, however, buy smarter, and the A’s 103 wins matched the Yankees’ total that year.
Most small businesses cannot compete with the billion-dollar advertising budgets of huge corporations. But they can use social data to spend their money more wisely – and maybe even hit a homerun using strategic audience intelligence and media optimization.
Tagged with marketing, moneyball, sabermetrics