Take the Pulse of Marketing with Data Visualization

Join leaders July 26-28 for Transform AI and Edge Week. Hear high-level leaders discuss topics around AL/ML technology, conversational AI, IVA, NLP, Edge, and more. Book your free pass now!

Chances are you've heard the phrase "a picture is worth a thousand words" before. What you might not know is that depending on the context, this can be somewhat misleading.

Listen to us. The human brain is wired to ingest images 60,000 times faster than text, representing 90% of the information we process every day in visual form. These numbers convincingly show why a picture deserves a little more credit than a thousand words.

But we didn't dig up a century-old proverb to quibble about its statistical flaws. Instead, we wanted to highlight how the sentiment behind the phrase has never been more appropriate for marketers who have to stay afloat in a growing sea of ​​raw data with each passing day.

Refine raw data with visualization

Clive Humby was onto something when he pitched data as new oil to fellow senior executives at the Association of National Advertisers (ANA) 2006 Master of Marketing Summit. A decade and a half later, his prediction has come to fruition, as data has completely replaced introspection and guesswork as the criteria for marketing success.

Event

Transform 2022

Sign up now to get your free virtual pass to Transform AI Week, July 26-28. Hear from AI and data leaders at Visa, Lowe's eBay, Credit Karma, Kaiser, Honeywell, Google, Nissan, Toyota, John Deere, and more.

register here

What makes Humby's foresight truly impressive, however, isn't the eventual rise of data as the king of advertising. It's more the fact that data, like raw material, is pretty much useless in its rawest form.

To elaborate, the oil goes through a refining process before reaching the pumps. The same goes for raw data. It needs to be contextualized and needs to be broken down into something more structured and ultimately actionable first.

This is where visualization comes in. Once the datasets are cleansed and standardized, visualization is the last critical step in the refinement process to turn them into intelligible graphs that fully display actionable insights.

Harness the power of data visualization

Take a second to absorb the contrast between left and right. The difference should be pretty stark unless you're a secret math mastermind.

Seriously, to the average Joe, the chart on the left appears like a random concoction of numbers that say nothing of substance. On the other hand, the scatter plots highlight the positive correlation linking the variables from the outset.

That's the power of visualization. It harnesses the ability to unlock hidden patterns, which makes it possible to connect the dots between disparate data points at once. For marketers who have to repeatedly ask loaded questions such as acquisition funnels leading to conversion, what time of day prospects are most active, etc., visualization can help reduce the pile. of raw data found in the...