Not everything a company does works out.
(That is different from everything that a company is doing not working out. :))
If you are in the data business – my bread, butter and tofu – you often carry the burden of being the bearer of bad news.
The conversion rate is down 30% at launch.
The goal was to deliver a 30% increase in revenue, the team delivered 1.7953%.
During 2019, our Net Promotion Score has dropped 15 points.
The average length of our video ads is 30 seconds, less than 10% of the audiences watches beyond 5 seconds and 90% is exposed to less than 1 second.
Our Market Share in the 2-ton truck market shrunk by 1.5% (= -$3 bil).
Negative data.
Accurately collected. Intelligently analyzed. Factually presented.
Sadly still, negative data to the person/team receiving it.
Why be hurtin’?
A decade ago, data people delivered a lot less bad news because so little could be measured with any degree of confidence.
In 2019, we can measure the crap out of so much. Even with the limitations of tools, government regulations, and the astonishing fragmentation of everything (attention, devices, consumption sources, identities and more).
Companies have also evolved to be significantly more complex beings, who have to do so much more than what they did 50 years ago. Think of all P&G had to do to sell soap 50 years ago, think of everything they are doing now. Add on top of that, where P&G could sell soap, the purposes it could sell soap for, and imagine both of those things now. It is a lot of stuff!
When you do that much stuff, and you can measure almost everything… The result is that our ecosystem of data people are returning